Sianna Serio

Degrees: B.S., Computer Science
Hometown: Bel Air, MD
Post-grad plans: Fulbright Scholarship to teach English in Slovakia

One of Sianna Serio’s most memorable UMBC experiences was giving a campus tour to UMBC President Valerie Sheares Ashby during her first day as the university’s new leader. Serio was ideally suited for the job, having worked for Residential Life as a resident assistant and for the Office of Undergraduate Admissions and Orientation as team lead for UMBC’s orientation peer ambassadors and as team lead for the Grit Guides, training and managing the rest of the campus tour guide team.

Prior to Serio’s first full semester at UMBC, she traveled to the University of Bristol to participate in the first Dawg Days: Abroad program, studying comparative politics. So, it was there in Bristol, England, that she first connected with the UMBC community. Since then, she has been involved in many UMBC student organizations, including the Society of Women Engineers, Sign of Life, First Generation Network and the UMBC Crafters club.

The Center for Women in Technology (CWIT) has been the academic focal point for Serio during her time at UMBC. She has been a CWIT Affiliate from the start, applied to live on the CWIT Living Learning Community floor for her first academic year, and volunteered for several events for prospective students. Last academic year, she served as a CWIT Peer Mentor for three incoming first-year students majoring in computer science. With her experience and enjoyment as a mentor, she became the CWIT Peer Mentoring Program student lead for 2022–2023 and has hosted several successful events for the 94 members of the program.

Has there been a mentor or fellow student who influenced your time at UMBC?

“Naomi Corns was a student a year above me who strongly influenced my first two years at UMBC. We originally met through a sociology class. While we weren’t the same major, we had a lot in common in personality and drive. After getting to know each other both inside and outside the classroom, she was one of the people to recommend me to be a resident assistant and she inspired me to become an active member of the UMBC community. She had also been an orientation peer ambassador while at UMBC, which I pursued as well. If it wasn’t for her leading by example and showing her support, I don’t think I would have been where I am today as a part of UMBC or as a student.”

What has been the best part of your UMBC experience?

“Everyone gets to choose how they want to show up everyday and the mark they want to make, and UMBC students are given so many opportunities to do so. When I came to UMBC, I had no intention of getting involved and putting myself out there. But after seeing so many opportunities laid out in front of me after just a few weeks on UMBC’s campus, it was almost impossible for me to avoid. I was constantly encouraged by the people around and me and I have grown in every aspect of my life.”

Sianna Serio

Degrees: B.S., Computer Science
Hometown: Bel Air, MD
Post-grad plans: Fulbright Scholarship to teach English in Slovakia

One of Sianna Serio’s most memorable UMBC experiences was giving a campus tour to UMBC President Valerie Sheares Ashby during her first day as the university’s new leader. Serio was ideally suited for the job, having worked for Residential Life as a resident assistant and for the Office of Undergraduate Admissions and Orientation as team lead for UMBC’s orientation peer ambassadors and as team lead for the Grit Guides, training and managing the rest of the campus tour guide team.

Prior to Serio’s first full semester at UMBC, she traveled to the University of Bristol to participate in the first Dawg Days: Abroad program, studying comparative politics. So, it was there in Bristol, England, that she first connected with the UMBC community. Since then, she has been involved in many UMBC student organizations, including the Society of Women Engineers, Sign of Life, First Generation Network and the UMBC Crafters club.

The Center for Women in Technology (CWIT) has been the academic focal point for Serio during her time at UMBC. She has been a CWIT Affiliate from the start, applied to live on the CWIT Living Learning Community floor for her first academic year, and volunteered for several events for prospective students. Last academic year, she served as a CWIT Peer Mentor for three incoming first-year students majoring in computer science. With her experience and enjoyment as a mentor, she became the CWIT Peer Mentoring Program student lead for 2022–2023 and has hosted several successful events for the 94 members of the program.

Has there been a mentor or fellow student who influenced your time at UMBC?

“Naomi Corns was a student a year above me who strongly influenced my first two years at UMBC. We originally met through a sociology class. While we weren’t the same major, we had a lot in common in personality and drive. After getting to know each other both inside and outside the classroom, she was one of the people to recommend me to be a resident assistant and she inspired me to become an active member of the UMBC community. She had also been an orientation peer ambassador while at UMBC, which I pursued as well. If it wasn’t for her leading by example and showing her support, I don’t think I would have been where I am today as a part of UMBC or as a student.”

What has been the best part of your UMBC experience?

“Everyone gets to choose how they want to show up everyday and the mark they want to make, and UMBC students are given so many opportunities to do so. When I came to UMBC, I had no intention of getting involved and putting myself out there. But after seeing so many opportunities laid out in front of me after just a few weeks on UMBC’s campus, it was almost impossible for me to avoid. I was constantly encouraged by the people around and me and I have grown in every aspect of my life.”

In the 1960s, a common routine for elementary school students was to practice hiding under their desks in case of a nuclear blast. Following the Bay of Pigs standoff in 1961, international tensions remained high as the United States and the Soviet Union continued advancing their nuclear weapons. But global armament was only a minor inconvenience to Stanley Czajkowski in those days. As a third grader in Miss Hamill’s class, he was busy falling in love with the riddle of math. 

Unbeknownst to this future Retriever was how he would eventually use those foundational mathematical skills to develop algorithms designed to protect presidential communications in case of a nuclear threat.

Czajkowski, who is nearing retirement after more than four decades of service to this project and other issues of national security, is leaving the mission in good hands. Among the experts on his team are several other UMBC alumni—working side by side to ensure the success of nuclear deterrence. 

Accounting for all the probabilities

Knowing what he would do with math only came after Czajkowski earned two sequential degrees in the subject at UMBC. Immediately following his bachelor’s in 1976, Czajkowski completed his master’s in mathematics in 1977, focusing on probability and statistics. He discovered the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) headquartered in Laurel, Maryland, at a career fair on campus, interviewed for a position, and has been working for the research division of Johns Hopkins for the past 45 years. 

Early on at APL (where more than 350 Retrievers work currently), Czajkowski got to see the real world impact of his work when tasked by the Navy to develop the mathematical methodology used to determine how many new aircraft to buy for a specific mission. Sixteen was the answer. “And those aircraft have been in operation for 30-plus years, doing an important mission,” says Czajkowski. “It gave me great satisfaction that, even at that young age, I had an impact on national security and when they put it all together, it was probably over a billion dollars at the time, for purchase.”

But this would not be the defining calculation of Czajkowski’s career. Among the many projects tasked with in the intervening decades, Czajkowski’s main efforts have focused on developing the mathematical models used to evaluate the communication systems that the president uses to command all the nuclear forces. “To assure that, under any circumstances, wherever the president is, in the White House, or on an airplane traveling, that he can communicate to the nuclear forces if needed,” says Czajkowski.

With a background in probability and statistics, Czajkowski’s job is to represent how well dedicated frequencies used for communications via aircraft, ships, or satellites will work in various situations. “The math comes in trying to figure out how well those communications will work in different environments,” explains Czajkowski. He gives an example of a submerged submarine, listening in on their antenna at a distant location. If you send information over the radio frequencies, how sure are you that it will be received? 

“You have to account for all the probabilities of different random events, and we have data that goes into the model that you have to calculate statistics on in order to support that calculation.”

Early in Czajkowski’s career, he helped design the simulation model used to do just that—and it’s still being used by both the U.S. Navy and the Air Force. “It’s become the national standard for modeling that kind of communications to submarines, bombers, and intercontinental ballistic missiles,” he says.

Defense relies on teamwork

Czajkowski, who writes the algorithms and performs analysis for this project, is relieved not to be working alone. “I concentrate on the analytical side, the math and statistics stuff. But it’s pretty much a team effort in our group—we have mathematicians, computer scientists, electrical engineers, and physicists, all working together to solve the problems.”

Some of those key players are other Retrievers. Meet Jim Miller ’87, computer science, who is now the group supervisor of Czajkowski and other technical staff members of the Nuclear Command Communications Systems Group of the Asymmetric Operations Sector.

Miller has only been in this role for about a year and half, but has worked for APL for 28 years.

“Our group collects and analyzes data to ensure the readiness state of our nation’s nuclear triad of bombers, ICBMs [intercontinental ballistic missiles], and SSBNs [submarines],” explains Miller. “So when the president needs to communicate with the joint chiefs while some major national security event is happening, we know that they have a robust, resilient, and secure communications path with our nuclear triad to effectively carry out our mission. And that mission is not only nuclear. That mission can be related to natural disasters, like Hurricane Katrina, when the president needs to deploy forces to help with humanitarian aid.”

Grounded in leadership

Miller—whose son James Miller ’13 and daughter Christine Miller ’17 are also Retrievers with computer science degrees—sees the root of his success stemming from his early growth at UMBC. “UMBC allowed me to have that opportunity to make relationships and understand how important they were, rather than being a lemming or a drone, just rotely going to class and not getting a full experience out of college,” says Miller. 

Those interpersonal skills have allowed him to take on increasingly larger leadership roles. “What I pride myself on today is building personal relationships with people, because each and every one of us has something to offer, and my job as the supervisor is to figure out what that is,” says Miller.

One of Miller’s newest team members is also a UMBC alumnus. Nick Sica ’22, computer science and history, started at APL just under a year ago. While his title is vaguely defined as “associate professional staff,” Sica says his main duties fall under software engineering, but also include data communications, data analysis, and cybersecurity. 

When Sica was interviewing at APL, he was asked his placement preference within the organization. His first choice was in NC3 (Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications) because of Miller. “It seemed he cared more about what I wanted to do in my position and what I was comfortable in doing and my growth, and less about just finding someone to cover the position,” said Sica. And since then, “he’s been making sure that I’ve transitioned well.”

As a recent graduate, many of the tasks require new skill sets for Sica, including work in computer and electrical engineering. But he knows just who to go to if he needs help, one of the longest serving leads on the team, Czajkowski.

Every Wednesday, in a team meeting, Sica sits down with Czajkowski and gets “his input on the progress that I’ve made on the task, as well as making sure that I understand the context of the situation and what we’re doing. This helps me create better code for the mission that we’re doing here.”

“Given the fact that I’ve been working in this area for so long,” says Czajkowski, “I’m looked at as a subject matter expert, so I often get consulted. This might involve getting together with team members on a particular project, discussing what the problems are, looking into, okay, ‘How do we move forward to solving this particular problem?’”

These algorithms support democracy 

“Stan is my trusted advisor,” says Miller. “He was in my seat before. To see someone with 45 years experience still have that desire and dedication, it’s amazing.”

Czajkowski, who plans to partially retire this year, is more mindful than ever of the need to pass down his knowledge, as well as the weight of the mission his team is responsible for.

Miller compares his team’s project to his previous position working in the Air and Missile Defense Sector, which would publicly demonstrate U.S. interceptors intercepting a missile. “We would launch a test missile, and would have our Aegis destroyers track it, engage it, and destroy it. The events are filmed for analysis and also demonstrate to the world that we have a very impressive capability, and it’s very effective,” says Miller. 

He points out that for nuclear capability, there’s no way to publicly display those ironclad defenses. “People just have our word that we are going to be able to respond. And so we back that up by ensuring that we can do that. But there’s no public display of that. So it’s harder for others to see the importance of what we do, but it’s absolutely critical.”

“We have preserved our democracy for all these years through nuclear deterrence,” continues Miller. “And Stan’s work is a testament to that.”

Vital work requires excellence 

On an unseasonably warm winter day in February, Czajkowski, Miller, and Sica walk around UMBC’s campus together, at ease in their off-the-cuff camaraderie. Sica, who only graduated the year before, takes the lead on introducing his colleagues to an entirely new landscape in the loop. While peeking into some of the bright, state-of-the-art classrooms in the Interdisciplinary Life Sciences Building, Sica shares that he was in class here when UMBC announced the start of remote learning in early March 2020. 

This leads to Miller’s memory of hearing of the 1986 Challenger disaster on the radio while on his commute to UMBC. The conversation moves on from dwelling on heavy topics. This visit is more of a field trip, a chance to take a break from the weightier aspects of their day-to-day mandate. 

Czajkowski, a men’s basketball season ticket holder, looks around campus with a sense of wonder. It’s come a long way since his tenure in the 1970s, but then again, so has he. Most people will not stay with the same employer for their entire career, much less continue to solve problems in the same area, and yet, Czajkowski has found satisfaction doing exactly that. 

“We have a very important mission that we’re working on, and I’m passionate about making sure that it is done well,” says Czajkowski. “One of the things that I’d say that UMBC taught me was how to think logically in the mathematical world, and dig deep into problems, and to be able to say, ‘Look, here’s how you approach the problem that’s being presented to you, and figure out a way to get to a solution.’”

“And the focus that I’ve applied throughout my career is, be excellent in everything you do, and make sure you do everything the right way. That’s just me as a person. It just gives me great satisfaction to know that I’m applying myself the best I can, and not taking shortcuts. You don’t want to be wrong in this world.”

It’s no secret that at UMBC we do things a little differently. As a university, we’re young, agile, and (buzzword that it may be) truly innovative. We can see the success of these traits in our rankings or research-lab results or employee-satisfaction surveys, but those numbers don’t tell the full story of how, when the Retriever community joins efforts to achieve greatness, we arrive there together.

So on the eve of UMBC’s 50th anniversary in 2016, when the institution put forth a goal to raise $150 million— money that goes directly to student scholarships, graduate fellowships, professorial awards, and so much more— we didn’t question if we would succeed, we just wondered how we’d be able to capture the magnitude of the collective campaign when it came to a close.

Now, wrapping up the endeavor with over $189 million, we get to celebrate the stories that made this all possible. This campaign called upon our community’s Grit & Greatness, and Retrievers responded in kind by making big breakthroughs, forging true partnerships, and transforming lives.

Making Big Breakthroughs

The Talent Goes Both Ways

“One of my top priorities is recruiting the best talent who aspire to be great leaders for our company and the nation,” says Jennifer Walsmith, vice president of the Cyber and Information Solutions business unit at Northrop Grumman and executive lead for university relations with UMBC. “Our deep connection with UMBC enables us to recruit and hire the very best. Many of our UMBC graduates have remained at Northrop for decades and play an invaluable leadership role in cybersecurity.”

Walsmith knows something about connection as a Retriever herself, graduating in 1990 with a degree in computer science—something she said was only possible due to 2 a.m. study sessions with classmates and encouraging lunch meet-ups with friends on campus. In her current role, she oversees 2,000 plus employees and is often seen on campus speaking to alumni, faculty, and board members.

“As a nation, we have been enabled by enjoying a technically superior way of life. However, the number of students in the technical fields is getting smaller, especially among women in these majors.” So how do Northrop Grumman and UMBC plan on breaking through that limitation? “I believe it’s vitally important that we all give back,” says Walsmith.

That looks like dozens of UMBC interns each semester who get the chance to work on the toughest problems in space, aeronautics, defense, and cyberspace; an alumni chapter at Northrop Grumman over 600 employees strong who volunteer considerable time at local schools; and millions of dollars spent to benefit students, programs, and research over the last campaign.

Northrop Grumman has a unique relationship with UMBC, but they are not alone in their support of UMBC students and faculty and graduate research. Throughout the Grit & Greatness campaign, 69 percent of commitments came from foundations and companies like T. Rowe Price, Morgan Stanley, Lockheed Martin, and Baltimore Gas and Electric Company.

“We are technical leaders, and I love to see our UMBC students thrive to become future leaders of our company and give back to other students,” says Walsmith. “So when you create the engine where people on each side fuel this relationship, it strengthens everyone.”

— Randianne Leyshon ’09

Breaking Through Education Barriers

In Baltimore City, middle schoolers are making roller coasters out of insulation tubing and tape. High schoolers are dunking basketballs to learn math equations. And not too far away at UMBC, the Sherman STEM Teacher Scholars are prepping to spread even more innovative, inclusive lessons throughout city schools.

The Sherman STEM Teacher Scholars Program, founded in 2006, and other initiatives supporting Retrievers to become culturally responsive and compassionate educators in historically underserved, urban schools, are thanks to the vision of philanthropists Betsy Sherman and her late husband George.

In early 2022, the Sherman Family Foundation donated $21 million to create the Betsy & George Sherman Center, which expands and integrates UMBC’s work in teacher preparation, school partnerships, and applied research focused on early childhood education and improving learning outcomes for Baltimore students. This gift allows educators to implement new teaching methods and find ways to break through learning barriers for their students.

The gift—the largest in UMBC’s history—will transform both UMBC and generations of local students. It also serves as a rallying point for others to join in giving and volunteering at participating schools. To date, says Greg Simmons, M.P.P. ’04,  and vice president of Institutional Advancement, “our school partnership work is our most robust community-based philanthropic effort given the scope and range of donors involved.” In addition to the Shermans’ foundational gift, other organizations—like the Richmond Family Foundation and Northop Grumman, just to name two—and many individual donors have supported this endeavor with their own time and resources.

“I see the legacy of the Sherman program as a seed,” says Haleemat Adekoya ’22, political science, a Sherman STEM Teacher Scholar. “It’s been planted and people will continue to water that seed…it will be one of those trees in a folk tale that does not die out because the community and the people who have benefited from its impact see the importance of that tree living beyond generations.”

— Randianne Leyshon ’09

Forging True Partnerships

The Snowball Effect

Sandy Geest ’72, English, knows the power of how a little can go a long way. When she graduated, she immediately started giving to the department that shaped her UMBC experience, “even if it was just 10 or 15 dollars a year,” she says. 

Now, 50 years later, Geest and her husband Jay have an endowed scholarship for English majors that has supported 10 students since 2017.

Geest spent most of her career as conference and event planner for James Rouse’s Enterprise Foundation, using her organizational skills to plan ribbon cuttings at the White House and pull together the 1992 U.S. Olympic Gymnastics Trials held in Baltimore. She says it was through the company’s matching shares program that she began to realize the power investments could have—if they could help her savings accrue over time, she wondered how her donations might increase as well.

Geest recounts how her office was located across from the then new Columbia Mall. On lunch breaks, her other coworkers would frequently go shopping. “And I told them, ‘No, you need to be putting your money into this fund because it will grow. When you’re old and gray, you’ll be glad you did that. These shoes will be all worn out by then.’”

Over time, Geest realized the same logic applied to her giving to UMBC. As she got raises and advanced through her career, she upped her giving. “I didn’t do it all at one time, [but] as it grew over the years I gave more and more,” she says, knowing the power for sizable change hinged on an endowment that would be invested by the university and able to sustain its monetary output. 

Her scholarship eventually snowballed to support up to four Retrievers a year. Her scholars’ success is the biggest reward, says Geest. At on-campus events, they tell her what a difference her giving made to their UMBC experience—it allowed them to explore career options through internships or it provided a lifeline when they thought they might have to drop out.

“It’s a very good feeling,” says Geest, “to know that you have put a hand back to help somebody behind you.”

— Randianne Leyshon ’09

The Competition Is Strong

Vanessa Mann, head coach for women’s soccer in her fifth season, has the mindset of leaving things better than you found them and uses the competitive spirit inherent in athletics to teach the power of giving back. This philosophy has led to 100 percent participation in UMBC’s annual Black & Gold Rush Giving Day among her student-athletes. 

The itch to compete motivates the other teams as well. Women’s lacrosse goalkeeper Isabella Fontana ’24, economics, sees it as the perfect way to get student-athletes engaged. “Not only do I want to support the women’s lacrosse team because everyone loves to support our team,” she says, “but as athletes, we always want to win. So if there’s something on the line, we’re like, ‘Oh, let’s do it.’”

Fontana’s competitive spirit earned her a year-long prime parking spot in front of the Chesapeake Employers Insurance Arena after she won UMBC’s 2022 Giving Day student ambassador challenge. By calling on her enthusiastic network of friends and family, Fontana generated the most donors (104) out of all the ambassadors and brought the lacrosse team’s total to 335, almost double the amount from the previous year. Curious what that looks like by the numbers? It’s the difference between $5,045 in 2020 and a whopping $40,040 in 2022.

The lacrosse team isn’t alone in getting people hyped for giving—in fact, Athletics is responsible for bringing in the most donors and dollars for UMBC’s annual Black & Gold Rush. Even so, they’re always striving to top themselves: in 2020, women’s soccer more than tripled their goal for donors. 

Both Fontana and Mann would be the first to remind you that good competition is nothing without cooperation. “So it wasn’t that we were really competing with anyone, like any outside entity,” Mann sums up. “We define competition as competere, which means to strive together. That’s actually the Latin translation. So it’s not me versus you, it’s actually me with you.”

— Levi Lewis ’23

Bridge-Building Alumni

Anwesha Dey came to UMBC from Singapore for a summer research internship. She ended up staying much longer, completing her Ph.D. in biochemistry in 2004. “In many ways, I think of the entire experience being one of the turning points in my life,” says Dey. “The sense of community and belonging and the focus on excellence at UMBC would go on to define my career.”

Now, as director and senior principal scientist of Discovery Oncology at Genentech, a groundbreaking biotechnology company, Dey is dedicated to bringing in UMBC students to her own lab and research community. Early in 2022, that meant inviting her former mentor, Mike Summers, professor of chemistry and biochemistry and the Robert E. Meyerhoff Chair for Excellence in Research and Mentoring, along with then president Freeman Hrabowski to Genentech to discuss the company’s ongoing support of UMBC. “We’re all mutually invested in the same thing,” says Dey. “When we first started this fellowship about five years ago, it was really one step at a time. And so it’s great to see where it is now. The trajectory is really strong.”

Dey is far from alone in bringing her enthusiasm for her alma mater to the workplace, and as more Retrievers go on to work in the upper echelons of the scientific community, they are finding ways to connect their industries to the campus that shaped them.

Bobby Allen ’99, M7, computer science is clear that he has a lot to be thankful for because of UMBC. He met his future wife Frances Allen ’99, M7, computer science, and many of his closest friends as teenagers in the Meyerhoff Program’s Summer Bridge. But aside from his personal connections, as a product manager at Google, it’s Allen’s personal mission to connect UMBC’s proven pipeline of talented Retrievers to his workplace. “At Google, we know we need to have underrepresented populations as managers, champions, executive support, and mentors so that as we hire graduates and interns, they see people who look like them and know what is possible.”

— Randianne Leyshon ’09

Transforming Lives

Rising to the Top 

It’s no accident that when visitors arrive on campus from the west entrance, they’re greeted by the radiant reflection on the silver slope of the Performing Arts and Humanities Building (PAHB). This LEED Gold-certified building, which opened in 2014, is a symbol of UMBC’s investment in the performing arts and humanities. But, it’s the students and activities inside the facility that really shine. 

Deven Fuller ’23 is a case in point. Double-majoring in dance and math, Fuller is a Linehan Artist Scholar—part of a selective program endowed by Earl and Darielle Linehan that has launched the careers of more than 300 Linehan Artist Scholar alumni in dance, music, theatre, and other creative disciplines. 

Fuller is focused on commercial dance—a highly competitive field that’s principally centered in New York and Los Angeles— which would put a career in his chosen field effectively out of reach were it not for the Linehans.

Thanks to the scholarship, Fuller said, he was able to join a New York–based dance training company in his sophomore year, take classes at local studios with accomplished touring commercial dancers, and enjoy other unique opportunities. The fact that the Linehans are “recognizing dance as a serious career…is just such an amazing thing,” Fuller said.

Most recently, with a Linehan Summer Research Award, “I was able to travel and do a certificate program at one of the most prestigious studios in the world for commercial dance. … I was very lucky to have the grant to be able to branch out in that direction.” 

Fuller is far from the only student to benefit from philanthropists’ investment in UMBC’s arts-focused students. Todd Carton ’77, interdisciplinary studies, has created the Carton Family Endowed Scholarship to support talented students in the performing arts who come from disadvantaged backgrounds. Along with a gift that helped to fund the PAHB, Carton has included UMBC in his estate plan so that the endowed scholarship can grow and benefit even more arts students far into UMBC’s future.

Fuller hasn’t had the opportunity to meet the Linehans, but if he could, he said, “I would thank them for the opportunities that I’ve been able to have because of them …and let them know how much they are positively affecting the community of artists.”

— Scott Cech

A Family That Gives Together

Professor Bimal Sinha and his family weren’t content to let his 30-plus years of pioneering academic contributions to UMBC be his only professional legacy. Even though neither he nor his sons Jit and Shomo Sinha attended the university, they decided to collectively donate $750,000 to create the Dr. Bimal Sinha Professorship in Statistics at UMBC.

The professorship permanently funds a new statistics faculty position at the university, which seems especially fitting, considering that Sinha founded the statistics department in 1985 and helped transform UMBC into a national leader in statistics education.

But Sinha’s sons remember that beyond his academic accolades, the way their father has always interacted with his mentees is what made the deepest impression— whether meeting international students at the airport or inviting groups of students to their family home for dinner.

Creating community has been a hallmark of Sinha’s career: The professor successfully spearheaded the African International Conference on Statistics, held in a different African country each year since 2014. In 2018, UMBC signed a memorandum of understanding with the University of Limpopo in South Africa to foster collaboration and exchange. A number of graduate students from African countries have also flourished with Sinha’s mentorship.

“Bimal has not only engaged in groundbreaking research for decades but has also produced and championed an impressive number of influential Black statisticians throughout Africa,” noted Freeman Hrabowski, UMBC president emeritus. 

In fact, the family’s dedication to continuing Sinha’s legacy has already inspired others: Forty alumni and friends of the university pitched in a combined $150,000, and the Maryland E-Nnovation Initiative Fund committed to a matching grant, bringing the professorship’s total endowment to $1.8 million.

“I feel honored and fortunate to have played a small role in the evolution of this beloved institution,” Sinha said. “Through this gift, I want to ensure that future generations of leading scholars will view UMBC as an attractive home to advance their contributions to the field of statistics.”

— Sarah Hansen, M.S. ’15

Gesture of Gratitude

When Felicia Sanders moved into Susquehanna Hall in the early ’90s as part of the fourth cohort of Meyerhoff Program Scholars, she found herself experiencing a series of firsts. It was her first time living in a mixed-gender dorm; the first time she understood the power of study groups; and she was a member of a scholarship program so new it hadn’t yet graduated its first class of scholars. “I thought I was just making friends, but this setup was really part of an ecosystem, a very effective one that set us up for success.”

The Meyerhoff Scholars Program fosters a collective spirit from day one—when students tackle Summer Bridge together. So when it came time to celebrate the program’s 30th anniversary and thank Robert Meyerhoff, the philanthropist who founded the program with President Emeritus Freeman Hrabowski, the graduates decided to give together, with an initial half-a-million dollar gift. 

“When we give collectively, we keep the continuity of the culture that was built by the program,” says Sanders ’96, M4, chemical engineering, and a leadership level giver. “We keep the family bond that was built by the program. It doesn’t become something that is piecemeal or start-stop or becomes intermittent because it is something that was fun for someone one year and then wasn’t supported the following year.”

The word Meyerhoff Scholars most often use to describe themselves is family. Not just a family of 1,300+ alumni who have gone on to use their gifts as industry leaders and academic powerhouses, but including the students who have yet to join their ranks as scholars, the future generation of Meyerhoffs. 

Jason Dixon ’02, M10, computer science, and Rhea Brooking-Dixon ’02, M10, biological sciences, whose origin story began in Summer Bridge, give together because “we know that our successes are never truly our own,” they share. “We are confident that our gifts to UMBC and the Meyerhoff Scholars Program will help other young scholars the same way the program has helped us and more.”

“It’s important for the family to be engaged in the program’s continuity,” says Sanders. “Now that Doc [Hrabowski] has moved on to the next chapter of his life, it’s important that the Meyerhoff Program is something we’re still talking about in another 30 years. And that can’t happen if the family doesn’t continue to reinvest.”

— Randianne Leyshon ’09

Students come to UMBC for many reasons—to find community, to explore a passion, to make change in the world. Once they figure out the “why” that truly drives their interests, the Retriever community is ready to kick in with the “how” to help make those plans a reality. Part of that looks like the traditional classroom experience with a professor, of course—but just as important are the experiential-learning moments that help many students actively connect the knowledge to careers they hope to pursue after graduation. 

UMBC students pursue applied learning in huge numbers. Despite the pandemic, nearly 80 percent of our recent graduates engaged in applied learning, including internships, research, co-ops, and service learning during their time at UMBC. An impressive 91 percent of new grads head directly to a job, advanced degree, or both within six months of graduating—and of those, more than half interned or worked for their employer as a student. 

“When it comes to impact, there is nothing more valuable than engaging in applied-learning opportunities to help clarify one’s career direction, build professional skills, and increase one’s professional network,” shares Susan Hindle, the Career Center’s assistant director of internships and employment. 

For students pursuing experiential learning through internships, campus jobs, research, and community engagement, it’s not just about learning how to do the thing they want to do. It’s about connecting the work to the passions that brought them to UMBC in the first place. These students and alumni working in their chosen fields tell the whole picture—what hands-on learning looks like when it comes full circle.

Essential Connections 

The desire to help people comes from deep within. But knowing how to do it successfully on a large scale—and understanding the systems and politics that  can make the job more or less challenging—takes more than  just compassion. 

On the morning of the monthly food delivery from the Maryland Food Bank, the brigade of students who keep the Retriever Essentials food pantry running see all sides of the work. Together, they unload and shelve staples like rice, pasta, and huge crates of broccoli for the more than 2,100 visits to the pantry so far this year. At the same time, they work with community members to understand what might make life better—halal meats, for one; more campus job opportunities, another biggie—and then put their heads together to try to make those changes happen.

For Ariel Barbosa, a grad student in UMBC’s community leadership program, working in this space is part of a journey that started with her trying to understand her Brazilian father’s immigrant experience better. As she works with Retriever Essentials, she’s learning about the complexities of these experiences in a way that will help her as she carves out a career in service. “There are so many signs showing me that I’m supposed to be right here, right now. I feel like I’m preparing,” she says. “Right now, I feel like I’m in a confidence-building, skill-building phase where I’m just trying to pick up as many skills as I can to be able to create what I feel I need to create at the right time.” 

As a student, Matthew Dolamore ’08, modern languages and linguistics, caught a first glimpse of what would later become a service-based career when he tutored Spanish-speaking clients for an immigration services office in Baltimore. After graduating, he went on to serve with AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps and earned a master’s degree in community planning before pulling all of those skills together into a full-circle career in Baltimore. 

Today, Dolamore is program director for the Esperanza Center, a project of Catholic Charities that assists more than 3,000 individuals each year with walk-in immigration services, including healthcare, legal assistance, and education tools. Dolamore serves as a connector between people and solutions, helping people get what they need when they need it and looking for ways to help improve the system. 

“Among our managers we have a nurse practitioner, a managing attorney, a licensed social worker, an individual who got their master’s in teaching English from UMBC, and a woman who oversees our one-touch client services desk who’s a former immigrant and just has a really dynamic background. And just those five people alone is symbolic of what I love about my job,” says Dolamore. 

“I’m not a medical professional. I’m not a legal professional. I’m not a social worker. I’m something myself of a generalist nonprofit manager at this stage in my career, but I get the opportunity every day to come in and out of these really focused professional engagements and try to help all five of them think of each other as teammates, and that’s the part of my job I really enjoy.” 

Lydia Sannella, a Peaceworker and grad student in applied sociology at UMBC, also enjoys the organizational aspect of her job with Retriever Essentials. As she looks ahead to her post-academic career, she’s already thinking about how she can continue to marry her values with her career—knowing that it won’t likely be quite the same as what she’s experiencing at UMBC. 

“I find that, whenever we want to do something, there are supportive, knowledgeable experts who want to help,” she says. “There’s just hoards of students who want to be involved and engaged and do any variety of work, from physical lifting to technical projects. And it’s just this canvas for creativity and possibility. It’s very reciprocal. What I’m able to contribute ends up being more significant and then what I get ends up being more significant.” 

— Jenny O’Grady

Becoming part of the solution

Students come to higher education for a variety of reasons, and among them, many have the goal of learning to create new things—from innovative water-quality solutions to entire companies. For many students, in fact, learning while doing is an integral part of going to college. 

If you ask Premal S. Shah ’98, biochemistry and molecular biology, however, he’ll tell you that there’s a world of difference between learning while doing and learning from doing. 

That’s not to say that Shah, who earned a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology on his way to founding and leading a string of successful healthcare-related companies, doesn’t believe in academics. But from his vantage point as CEO at MyOme, a genomics firm based in northern California, classroom-based learning is only a part of the puzzle. 

Shah said he’s always had a practical streak, but he found out how much experiential learning can boost classroom learning thanks to a hands-on internship and fellowship at the National Institutes of Health, beginning while he was a student at UMBC.

“When I got to grad school, there were a lot of people who hadn’t really worked in a lab or done stuff,” he said. “I had a huge head start, just because I was able to pick up a pipette and actually use it. I knew what a DNA extraction protocol was. I knew how to use certain machinery.” 

It was a vivid object lesson—one Shah has carried forward into his career. “When you start building companies, there’s always that challenge…of analysis paralysis, right?” he said. “There’s a notion of, ‘We could do this or that. Let’s read and learn more or get additional inputs in search of the perfect answer.’ Or we can actually go build something that will benefit people and iterate even faster as we learn more to make it much better.” 

That’s the big difference between studying science and, for example, running science-based companies, Shah says: “The hypotheticals are great. The theories are great. But you’ve got to get [things] done.” 

Getting things done is Matt Stromberg’s perennial modus operandi. Being a Ph.D. student studying environmental engineering means he is very much both an environmental scientist—someone who studies environmental problems—and an engineer: someone who works to solve those problems. “I always knew I was a passionate environmentalist, but I also knew I liked to build things,” he said. 

In fact, Stromberg, who graduated in 2019 from the University of Virginia with bachelor’s degrees in both environmental engineering and environmental science, is a literal embodiment of learning while doing. Working as both a graduate research assistant and a researcher in the jointly run University System of Maryland Institute for Marine and Environmental Technology (IMET), he sometimes finds himself simultaneously running experiments and keeping the experiments running. 

A few months ago, Stromberg said, the night before an experiment was scheduled to start, a pump failed in IMET’s Aquaculture Research Center, a 1,800-square-meter facility with hundreds of fish tanks. 

“It was a large pump, and it needed to be replaced—and it was eight o’clock at night,” Stromberg said. “I had already worked 12 hours that day, [but] I realized that there’s no way this experiment is going to run if I don’t have a pump tomorrow. So…I got the wrenches and I got all the fittings I needed,” and found a way to fix it. 

Stromberg’s ability to save that experiment is part and parcel of his approach. One of his main research projects is unclogging a major bottleneck that prevents more farm-raised fish from getting to market: purging them of an unsavory flavor that’s sometimes characteristic of fish that aren’t caught in the wild. As Stromberg put it, “You’re not going to sell the fish if it tastes like dirt.” 

That’s a problem not only for aquaculture companies—which have to use lots of water, time, money, and energy to purge the fish of this taste—but also for the planet. That’s because the only alternative to aquaculture is fishing in the wild, which can destroy ecosystems but is still cheaper than aquaculture, due to the expensive purging process. 

He’s working with advanced oxidative processes and a technology of his own that would effectively create a shortcut, making it more cost-effective to farm fish and thus helping to protect wild habitat in the process. And Stromberg aims to eventually put his Ph.D. to work in a similarly practical way: His goal is to create a company that performs chemical analysis and remediation of water contaminants. 

“I’ve learned a lot from my time here,” he says. “Especially not to over-engineer things!” 

— Scott Cech

Community-centered art

Visual art is all around us—in flyers, television commercials, and even clothes. And while many of us may never know the artists creating work behind the scenes, their lives and experiences certainly do shape their work. 

For instance, earlier this year, Jennifer White-Johnson ’08, visual arts, designed a collection for Target’s national Latino Heritage Month campaign, including a tumbler with stacked text reading sonando vivamente vividly dreaming and a T-shirt proudly proclaiming piel canela pelo rizado (brown/cinnamon skin curly hair). As a disabled, neurodiverse, Afro-Latina designer from Baltimore, White-Johnson sees her inclusion as an opportunity to highlight and provide a voice to communities that often aren’t heard or represented.

“I am really honored to have been chosen and included in this year’s Target Latino Heritage Month collection and campaign,” says White-Johnson. “Using art and design to celebrate and elevate my cultural stories, the strength, and legacy of my ancestors, felt like something that was meant to be!” 

Living with undiagnosed ADHD as a student, White-Johnson often felt like her intensity, excitement, and point of view were unwelcome or just too much. That changed when she transferred to UMBC, where she immediately felt at home. In particular, her time as director of promotions for the Student Events Board [(seb)] gave her her first taste of how graphic design could marry with communit-ycentric work. 

Working closely with the Office of Student Life, White-Johnson and other members of (seb) volunteered during an alternative spring-break trip to post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. White-Johnson also designed the T-shirts. 

“This was in 2007, so we could help offer some sort of relief from Hurricane Katrina,” says White-Johnson. “It was life-changing because I was able to surround myself with other like-minded scholars that were serious about academic life but who also understood that school is about self-discovery.” 

Enter Patch Hatley, a sophomore visual arts major with a concentration in animation. Fresh from a session learning how to create stop-motion animation puppets from paper, she is excited to test out some of what she’s learned on the job at commonvision, the student-driven print and design center in The Commons. On any given day, one might find her working on anything from animating cute countdowns for student activities to designing stickers. 

“I’m always constantly learning in an environment like commonvision,” she says. “Each new skill helps transition to the next project, and each project creates new and exciting opportunities. You’re always surrounded by a team who are all community-driven, so I always feel like I can ask for help or constructive criticism. commonvision supports, drives, and motivates me to keep reaching for the stars and will always be an important part of how I’ve grown—not just as an artist but as a team player.” 

Hatley finds work at commonvision particularly helpful because it stretches her creative muscles and opens up her craft to new programs, tools, and mediums, and also because other creators surround her. After spending a decade in animation and illustration before becoming a Retriever, Hatley loves the opportunity to expand her craft in a place that has fostered the foundation for budding designers for years—and getting to bring her personal perspective into work for clients. 

“At the end of the day, you’re drawing for yourself and for the people around you whether you realize it implicitly or not,” says Hatley. At the core of both artists’ practices is community. Both White-Johnson and Hatley recognize that their art doesn’t live in a vacuum but exists as a letter of inspiration, solidarity, and encouragement to their respective communities. Both artists, years apart in their practice, found similar communities to nurture and invest in them. 

“Being given the space to bring visibility to themes of cultural intersectionality, specifically the parts of our natural beauty that aren’t always celebrated, our caramel brown, cinnamon skin, and our natural curls,” says White-Johnson. “I hope my work can culturally inspire others to center what they want to see more of.” 

— Sharéa Harris

Taking experiential learning to the next level

Developing high-level skills in a highly technical field like computer science is difficult enough. But the ability to both master and successfully teach those skills to others takes the challenge to a whole new level. 

Fortunately, Amina Mahmood and Zach Margulies thrive at that level. With their dedication to passing along computer-science knowledge, these Retrievers amply demonstrate that doing while teaching and learning while doing are just different parts of the same equation. 

As Mahmood ’21, computer science, tells it, she started learning while doing quite literally. Just weeks into her first year at UMBC, Mahmood found herself working 20 hours a week as a junior malware analyst at Huntress, a cybersecurity firm that was then still in the startup phase at the bwtech@UMBC Research and Technology Park.

“I didn’t really have any experience, but I was pretty ambitious, so I learned everything on the job,” she said.

Mahmood, part of UMBC’s Cyber Scholars Program, quickly learned how to run different types of malware on a virtual machine, dissect the particulars of each, and create mitigation reports. The nascent company’s culture also helped boost her confidence. If she ran into a problem, she said, the people she worked with were glad to bring her up to speed. 

“It was just like, ‘Oh, you don’t know this—let me teach it to you.’ And then I picked up on it and then I was like, ‘OK—I can do this,’” Mahmood said. Mahmood was quick to apply such on-the-job learning to her academics, even persuading an academic advisor to allow her to add her to his overenrolled, graduate-level software reverse-engineering course at the same time she was enrolled in an undergraduate prerequisite class. 

Mahmood not only aced the graduate-level class, she also started using what she had learned to complete the experiential-learning cycle at her new part-time job at Parsons Corp., a technology-focused defense, intelligence, security, and infrastructure engineering firm. 

“One of my mentors at Parsons—he really supported me, and he said, ‘You know a lot about reverse engineering. Why don’t you just make a course and teach coworkers?’” That’s exactly what Mahmood did— and now does for new summer interns as a full-time reverse engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab. 

Recently she found herself completing the circle, coming back to UMBC for the same kind of career fair where she’d found her first job as a first-year student. “But [this time] I didn’t go as a student,” she noted. “I went as an employer.” 

Margulies ’14, biological sciences, is completing his own trajectory: Nearly a decade after earning his first bachelor’s degree, he has returned to UMBC to earn a bachelor’s in computer science and a master’s in education, with the goal of teaching computer science to Baltimore high school students when he graduates in 2024. 

Margulies started his career pivot before diving back into academics immersing himself in on-the-job data science and programming—including a Maryland Institute for Innovative Computing internship at the Maryland Department of Health after starting in the computer science program. Because of this, he’s able to pursue his studies with a greater sense of perspective.

“I feel like it inspires confidence and it builds your self-esteem, taking what you’ve learned in the class and not even a semester later applying it in a real-world setting,” he said. 

Margulies noted that, as a teacher, he’ll also be able to fully address high schoolers’ perennial classroom question: ‘When am I ever going to use this in real life?’ 

“It’s really important for teachers to know what the practical application of [schoolwork] is going to be and what working in a computer science job will look like,” he said. 

A case in point, Margulies said, was the work he did as part of a Maryland Department of Health internship last summer, reviewing and finding improvements for data collection, including the creation of a data dashboard. 

“Last semester, I took Computer Science 201, and we learned the programming language Python, and I really wanted to start applying that language at the internship,” he said. Because he’d had both practical experience and formal training, Margulies said, he was able to see that he’d have to adapt what he’d learned to suit the task at hand. 

“[I had] to figure out a way that I could take Python and apply it to developing the database because that’s not something we necessarily learned in the class,” he said. “I had a lot of fun taking the thing that I learned academically and not just applying it, but also taking it to the next level.” 

— Scott Cech

Students come to UMBC for many reasons—to find community, to explore a passion, to make change in the world. Once they figure out the “why” that truly drives their interests, the Retriever community is ready to kick in with the “how” to help make those plans a reality. Part of that looks like the traditional classroom experience with a professor, of course—but just as important are the experiential-learning moments that help many students actively connect the knowledge to careers they hope to pursue after graduation. 

UMBC students pursue applied learning in huge numbers. Despite the pandemic, nearly 80 percent of our recent graduates engaged in applied learning, including internships, research, co-ops, and service learning during their time at UMBC. An impressive 91 percent of new grads head directly to a job, advanced degree, or both within six months of graduating—and of those, more than half interned or worked for their employer as a student. 

“When it comes to impact, there is nothing more valuable than engaging in applied-learning opportunities to help clarify one’s career direction, build professional skills, and increase one’s professional network,” shares Susan Hindle, the Career Center’s assistant director of internships and employment. 

For students pursuing experiential learning through internships, campus jobs, research, and community engagement, it’s not just about learning how to do the thing they want to do. It’s about connecting the work to the passions that brought them to UMBC in the first place. These students and alumni working in their chosen fields tell the whole picture—what hands-on learning looks like when it comes full circle.

Essential connections 

The desire to help people comes from deep within. But knowing how to do it successfully on a large scale—and understanding the systems and politics that  can make the job more or less challenging—takes more than just compassion. 

On the morning of the monthly food delivery from the Maryland Food Bank, the brigade of students who keep the Retriever Essentials food pantry running see all sides of the work. Together, they unload and shelve staples like rice, pasta, and huge crates of broccoli for the more than 2,100 visits to the pantry so far this year. At the same time, they connect with community members to understand what might make life better—halal meats, for one; more campus job opportunities, another biggie—and then put their heads together to try to make those changes happen.

For Ariel Barbosa, a grad student in UMBC’s community leadership program, working in this space is part of a journey that started with her trying to understand her Brazilian father’s immigrant experience better. As she works with Retriever Essentials, she’s learning about the complexities of these experiences in a way that will help her as she carves out a career in service.

“There are so many signs showing me that I’m supposed to be right here, right now. I feel like I’m preparing,” she says. “Right now, I feel like I’m in a confidence-building, skill-building phase where I’m just trying to pick up as many skills as I can to be able to create what I feel I need to create at the right time.” 

As a student, Matthew Dolamore ’08, modern languages and linguistics, caught a first glimpse of what would later become a service-based career when he tutored Spanish-speaking clients for an immigration services office in Baltimore. After graduating, he went on to serve with AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps and earned a master’s degree in community planning before pulling all of those skills together into a full-circle career in Baltimore. 

Today, Dolamore is program director for the Esperanza Center, a project of Catholic Charities that assists more than 3,000 individuals each year with walk-in immigration services, including healthcare, legal assistance, and education tools. Dolamore serves as a connector between people and solutions, helping people get what they need when they need it and looking for ways to help improve the system. 

“Among our managers we have a nurse practitioner, a managing attorney, a licensed social worker, an individual who got their master’s in teaching English from UMBC, and a woman who oversees our one-touch client services desk who’s a former immigrant and just has a really dynamic background. And just those five people alone is symbolic of what I love about my job,” says Dolamore. 

“I’m not a medical professional. I’m not a legal professional. I’m not a social worker. I’m something myself of a generalist nonprofit manager at this stage in my career, but I get the opportunity every day to come in and out of these really focused professional engagements and try to help all five of them think of each other as teammates, and that’s the part of my job I really enjoy.” 

Lydia Sannella, a Peaceworker and grad student in applied sociology at UMBC, also enjoys the organizational aspect of her job with Retriever Essentials. As she looks ahead to her post-academic career, she’s already thinking about how she can continue to marry her values with her career—knowing that it won’t likely be quite the same as what she’s experiencing at UMBC. 

“I find that, whenever we want to do something, there are supportive, knowledgeable experts who want to help,” she says. “There’s just hoards of students who want to be involved and engaged and do any variety of work, from physical lifting to technical projects. And it’s just this canvas for creativity and possibility. It’s very reciprocal. What I’m able to contribute ends up being more significant and then what I get ends up being more significant.” 

— Jenny O’Grady

Becoming part of the solution

Students come to higher education for a variety of reasons, and among them, many have the goal of learning to create new things—from innovative water-quality solutions to entire companies. For many students, in fact, learning while doing is an integral part of going to college. 

If you ask Premal S. Shah ’98, biochemistry and molecular biology, however, he’ll tell you that there’s a world of difference between learning while doing and learning from doing. 

That’s not to say that Shah, who earned a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology on his way to founding and leading a string of successful healthcare-related companies, doesn’t believe in academics. But from his vantage point as CEO at MyOme, a genomics firm based in northern California, classroom-based learning is only a part of the puzzle. 

Shah said he’s always had a practical streak, but he found out how much experiential learning can boost classroom learning thanks to a hands-on internship and fellowship at the National Institutes of Health, beginning while he was a student at UMBC.

“When I got to grad school, there were a lot of people who hadn’t really worked in a lab or done stuff,” he said. “I had a huge head start, just because I was able to pick up a pipette and actually use it. I knew what a DNA extraction protocol was. I knew how to use certain machinery.” 

It was a vivid object lesson—one Shah has carried forward into his career. “When you start building companies, there’s always that challenge…of analysis paralysis, right?” he said. “There’s a notion of, ‘We could do this or that. Let’s read and learn more or get additional inputs in search of the perfect answer.’ Or we can actually go build something that will benefit people and iterate even faster as we learn more to make it much better.” 

That’s the big difference between studying science and, for example, running science-based companies, Shah says: “The hypotheticals are great. The theories are great. But you’ve got to get [things] done.” 

Getting things done is Matt Stromberg’s perennial modus operandi. Being a Ph.D. student studying environmental engineering means he is very much both an environmental scientist—someone who studies environmental problems—and an engineer: someone who works to solve those problems. “I always knew I was a passionate environmentalist, but I also knew I liked to build things,” he said. 

In fact, Stromberg, who graduated in 2019 from the University of Virginia with bachelor’s degrees in both environmental engineering and environmental science, is a literal embodiment of learning while doing. Working as both a graduate research assistant and a researcher in the jointly run University System of Maryland Institute for Marine and Environmental Technology (IMET), he sometimes finds himself simultaneously running experiments and keeping the experiments running. 

A few months ago, Stromberg said, the night before an experiment was scheduled to start, a pump failed in IMET’s Aquaculture Research Center, a 1,800-square-meter facility with hundreds of fish tanks. 

“It was a large pump, and it needed to be replaced—and it was eight o’clock at night,” Stromberg said. “I had already worked 12 hours that day, [but] I realized that there’s no way this experiment is going to run if I don’t have a pump tomorrow. So…I got the wrenches and I got all the fittings I needed,” and found a way to fix it. 

Stromberg’s ability to save that experiment is part and parcel of his approach. One of his main research projects is unclogging a major bottleneck that prevents more farm-raised fish from getting to market: purging them of an unsavory flavor that’s sometimes characteristic of fish that aren’t caught in the wild. As Stromberg put it, “You’re not going to sell the fish if it tastes like dirt.” 

That’s a problem not only for aquaculture companies—which have to use lots of water, time, money, and energy to purge the fish of this taste—but also for the planet. That’s because the only alternative to aquaculture is fishing in the wild, which can destroy ecosystems but is still cheaper than aquaculture, due to the expensive purging process. 

He’s working with advanced oxidative processes and a technology of his own that would effectively create a shortcut, making it more cost-effective to farm fish and thus helping to protect wild habitat in the process. And Stromberg aims to eventually put his Ph.D. to work in a similarly practical way: His goal is to create a company that performs chemical analysis and remediation of water contaminants. 

“I’ve learned a lot from my time here,” he says. “Especially not to over-engineer things!” 

— Scott Cech

Community-centered art

Visual art is all around us—in flyers, television commercials, and even clothes. And while many of us may never know the artists creating work behind the scenes, their lives and experiences certainly do shape their work. 

For instance, earlier this year, Jennifer White-Johnson ’08, visual arts, designed a collection for Target’s national Latino Heritage Month campaign, including a tumbler with stacked text reading sonando vivamente vividly dreaming and a T-shirt proudly proclaiming piel canela pelo rizado (brown/cinnamon skin curly hair). As a disabled, neurodiverse, Afro-Latina designer from Baltimore, White-Johnson sees her inclusion as an opportunity to highlight and provide a voice to communities that often aren’t heard or represented.

“I am really honored to have been chosen and included in this year’s Target Latino Heritage Month collection and campaign,” says White-Johnson. “Using art and design to celebrate and elevate my cultural stories, the strength, and legacy of my ancestors, felt like something that was meant to be!” 

Living with undiagnosed ADHD as a student, White-Johnson often felt like her intensity, excitement, and point of view were unwelcome or just too much. That changed when she transferred to UMBC, where she immediately felt at home. In particular, her time as director of promotions for the Student Events Board [(seb)] gave her her first taste of how graphic design could marry with communit-ycentric work. 

Working closely with the Office of Student Life, White-Johnson and other members of (seb) volunteered during an alternative spring-break trip to post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. White-Johnson also designed the T-shirts. 

“This was in 2007, so we could help offer some sort of relief from Hurricane Katrina,” says White-Johnson. “It was life-changing because I was able to surround myself with other like-minded scholars that were serious about academic life but who also understood that school is about self-discovery.” 

Enter Patch Hatley, a sophomore visual arts major with a concentration in animation. Fresh from a session learning how to create stop-motion animation puppets from paper, she is excited to test out some of what she’s learned on the job at commonvision, the student-driven print and design center in The Commons. On any given day, one might find her working on anything from animating cute countdowns for student activities to designing stickers. 

“I’m always constantly learning in an environment like commonvision,” she says. “Each new skill helps transition to the next project, and each project creates new and exciting opportunities. You’re always surrounded by a team who are all community-driven, so I always feel like I can ask for help or constructive criticism. commonvision supports, drives, and motivates me to keep reaching for the stars and will always be an important part of how I’ve grown—not just as an artist but as a team player.” 

Hatley finds work at commonvision particularly helpful because it stretches her creative muscles and opens up her craft to new programs, tools, and mediums, and also because other creators surround her. After spending a decade in animation and illustration before becoming a Retriever, Hatley loves the opportunity to expand her craft in a place that has fostered the foundation for budding designers for years—and getting to bring her personal perspective into work for clients. 

“At the end of the day, you’re drawing for yourself and for the people around you whether you realize it implicitly or not,” says Hatley. At the core of both artists’ practices is community. Both White-Johnson and Hatley recognize that their art doesn’t live in a vacuum but exists as a letter of inspiration, solidarity, and encouragement to their respective communities. Both artists, years apart in their practice, found similar communities to nurture and invest in them. 

“Being given the space to bring visibility to themes of cultural intersectionality, specifically the parts of our natural beauty that aren’t always celebrated, our caramel brown, cinnamon skin, and our natural curls,” says White-Johnson. “I hope my work can culturally inspire others to center what they want to see more of.” 

— Sharéa Harris

Taking experiential learning to the next level

Developing high-level skills in a highly technical field like computer science is difficult enough. But the ability to both master and successfully teach those skills to others takes the challenge to a whole new level. 

Fortunately, Amina Mahmood and Zach Margulies thrive at that level. With their dedication to passing along computer-science knowledge, these Retrievers amply demonstrate that doing while teaching and learning while doing are just different parts of the same equation. 

As Mahmood ’21, computer science, tells it, she started learning while doing quite literally. Just weeks into her first year at UMBC, Mahmood found herself working 20 hours a week as a junior malware analyst at Huntress, a cybersecurity firm that was then still in the startup phase at the bwtech@UMBC Research and Technology Park.

“I didn’t really have any experience, but I was pretty ambitious, so I learned everything on the job,” she said.

Mahmood, part of UMBC’s Cyber Scholars Program, quickly learned how to run different types of malware on a virtual machine, dissect the particulars of each, and create mitigation reports. The nascent company’s culture also helped boost her confidence. If she ran into a problem, she said, the people she worked with were glad to bring her up to speed. 

“It was just like, ‘Oh, you don’t know this—let me teach it to you.’ And then I picked up on it and then I was like, ‘OK—I can do this,’” Mahmood said. Mahmood was quick to apply such on-the-job learning to her academics, even persuading an academic advisor to allow her to add her to his overenrolled, graduate-level software reverse-engineering course at the same time she was enrolled in an undergraduate prerequisite class. 

Mahmood not only aced the graduate-level class, she also started using what she had learned to complete the experiential-learning cycle at her new part-time job at Parsons Corp., a technology-focused defense, intelligence, security, and infrastructure engineering firm. 

“One of my mentors at Parsons—he really supported me, and he said, ‘You know a lot about reverse engineering. Why don’t you just make a course and teach coworkers?’” That’s exactly what Mahmood did— and now does for new summer interns as a full-time reverse engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab. 

Recently she found herself completing the circle, coming back to UMBC for the same kind of career fair where she’d found her first job as a first-year student. “But [this time] I didn’t go as a student,” she noted. “I went as an employer.” 

Margulies ’14, biological sciences, is completing his own trajectory: Nearly a decade after earning his first bachelor’s degree, he has returned to UMBC to earn a bachelor’s in computer science and a master’s in education, with the goal of teaching computer science to Baltimore high school students when he graduates in 2024. 

Margulies started his career pivot before diving back into academics immersing himself in on-the-job data science and programming—including a Maryland Institute for Innovative Computing internship at the Maryland Department of Health after starting in the computer science program. Because of this, he’s able to pursue his studies with a greater sense of perspective.

“I feel like it inspires confidence and it builds your self-esteem, taking what you’ve learned in the class and not even a semester later applying it in a real-world setting,” he said. 

Margulies noted that, as a teacher, he’ll also be able to fully address high schoolers’ perennial classroom question: ‘When am I ever going to use this in real life?’ 

“It’s really important for teachers to know what the practical application of [schoolwork] is going to be and what working in a computer science job will look like,” he said. 

A case in point, Margulies said, was the work he did as part of a Maryland Department of Health internship last summer, reviewing and finding improvements for data collection, including the creation of a data dashboard. 

“Last semester, I took Computer Science 201, and we learned the programming language Python, and I really wanted to start applying that language at the internship,” he said. Because he’d had both practical experience and formal training, Margulies said, he was able to see that he’d have to adapt what he’d learned to suit the task at hand. 

“[I had] to figure out a way that I could take Python and apply it to developing the database because that’s not something we necessarily learned in the class,” he said. “I had a lot of fun taking the thing that I learned academically and not just applying it, but also taking it to the next level.” 

— Scott Cech

Two researchers from The Hilltop Institute at UMBC just received a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to investigate hospital price transparency. With the nearly $300,000 award funded by the Build and Broaden initiative, Morgan Henderson, principal data scientist and affiliate professor of economics, and Morgane Mouslim, policy analyst, will collect and synthesize prices for common health services now being posted by hospitals in response to a 2021 federal mandate intended to help patients “shop” for lower-priced care. Henderson and Mouslim will use the data to study hospital pricing behavior, and they will also make the data available to other researchers.

Hospital care is a major driver of spiraling health care costs and this work has the potential to refocus the conversation among policymakers, practitioners, and consumers. It’s also just one of Hilltop’s numerous high-impact research projects from a nearly 30-year history at UMBC. A hallmark of that research is partnership.

Collaboration from day one

Hilltop launched at UMBC in 1994, in partnership with the Maryland Department of Health. One of Hilltop’s first tasks was to design HealthChoice, the state’s Medicaid managed care program that now serves more than 1.7 million Marylanders. 

More than a quarter of a century later, the partnership has grown to advance access to high-quality health care by providing Maryland policymakers and state agencies with the information they need to make well-informed, evidence-based decisions about health care delivery and financing. 

This collaborative work has garnered Hilltop national recognition as a model public university-state agency partnership. State officials and university researchers from across the country turn to Hilltop for advice on forming productive partnerships. Hilltop is also a founding member of a national network of partnerships representing 27 states that are a leading force in advancing sophisticated analytics to inform state health policy.

Advancing Medicaid

Hilltop pairs novel problem-solving and big data to address pressing issues related to access to health care and the delivery and financing of services. A major piece of this involves working with the Maryland Department of Health to advance the health of Marylanders with low incomes and disabilities in the Medicaid program. Hilltop’s interagency agreement with the Department for policy analysis and analytical support for the Medicaid program—renewed annually since 1994—topped $10 million in 2022. 

Hilltop maintains an extensive data repository to house Maryland Medicaid data. Using this data, Hilltop calculates the fixed monthly payments the state pays to health plans for each of its members participating in HealthChoice, totaling more than $7 billion in 2022. The repository also houses Maryland hospital discharge data, Medicare data, nursing home assessment data, data on commercially insured individuals, and more. Hilltop is building interactive data dashboards and visualizations that the Department can use daily to guide decision-making on programs and services.

“Hilltop has expanded and solidified its role as a vital resource for high-quality data analytics for Maryland’s Medicaid program,” says Cynthia H. Woodcock, executive director of Hilltop and an adjunct professor at UMBC’s Erickson School of Aging Studies.

Tools for the health system 

In addition to its Medicaid-related work, Hilltop has developed a series of innovative analytical tools that are supporting Maryland’s state-of-the-art health care system, called the Total Cost of Care Model.

Maryland hospitals use Hilltop’s web-based tool to report community benefit activities and expenditures. The tool streamlines data collection and enables statewide longitudinal analysis of community benefit data. The findings inform efforts to improve population health under the Total Cost of Care Model. 

Hilltop launched the Hilltop Pre-AH Model to help identify patients in the Maryland Primary Care Program—part of Maryland’s Total Cost of Care Model—who would benefit most from intensive primary care coordination, which can help to prevent unnecessary hospitalizations. Innovations like these are designed to simultaneously improve the health care patients receive and decrease unnecessary costs to the health care system.

Rapid response to COVID-19

Thanks to its strong relationships with the Department of Health and other state agencies, when the coronavirus pandemic began, Hilltop was able to quickly respond to requests for data on COVID-19 testing, hospitalizations, and vaccinations. They also provided daily support to the Department on implementing data-informed emergency measures and guidance for health care providers. 

Now in the third year of the pandemic, Hilltop continues to support the state with COVID-related analytics to inform a wide range of infrastructure and service needs. Hilltop researchers also expanded the groundbreaking Pre-AH Model to predict a patient’s risk of being hospitalized for COVID-19, funded by a COVID-19 Accelerated Translational Incubator Pilot (ATIP). 

Public health impact

Hilltop continues to address long-standing critical public health concerns, from HIV to tobacco use to the opioid epidemic.

Hilltop is a member of the Maryland HIV Medicaid Affinity Group and the Greater Baltimore HIV Health Services Planning Committee and provides technical support and analytics for HIV services offered to Medicaid participants.

In collaboration with the Center for Mississippi Health Policy, Hilltop researchers quantified the financial impact of tobacco use on Mississippi’s Medicaid program and estimated the economic impact on the state budget and hospitals if the state were to expand Medicaid as the Affordable Care Act allows. 

With funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Hilltop and twelve other states’ university partners are assessing the quality of opioid use disorder treatment and its outcomes for Medicaid participants. 

Another project includes researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University. This study examines the effect of new Medicaid programs in Maryland and Virginia that increase access to the full continuum of addiction treatment services, seeking to reduce overdose deaths.

Hilltop’s visionary work continues to set the bar for health care data analytics. It illustrates how the emerging field of data science can tangibly improve health care access and affordability and can reshape the understanding of the social determinants of health. 

Woodcock reflects, “The Hilltop Institute epitomizes the spirit of UMBC’s mission to integrate teaching, research and engaged scholarship, and service to benefit communities in Maryland and beyond.”

By Margaret Moffett

​​For La Jerne Terry Cornish, Ph.D. ’05, language, literacy, and culture, an already remarkable day was about to become unforgettable. There she stood in front of a big crowd at UMBC, accepting the 2019 Outstanding Alumna in the Humanities award. Even better, she was getting the chance to chronicle her journey from high school English teacher to college professor to provost and vice president of Ithaca College in New York. 

“I’ve spent the last 21 years trying to be the change I wanted to see,” she told the audience—channeling the wisdom of her role model, who just happened to be sitting behind her on the stage.

Her speech complete, Cornish had returned to her chair when the role model in question leaned toward her. “You’re going to be a college president someday,” he whispered, his eyes no doubt twinkling with delight.  “If you say so,” Cornish responded with a nervous laugh, bewildered by his faith in her.

Fast forward three years to March 2022, when Cornish was named Ithaca College’s 10th president. Dr. Freeman Hrabowski was right. Again. 

At the 2019 Alumni Award ceremony, from left to right: Dr. Hrabowski, Dean Kimberly Moffitt, La Jerne Terry Cornish, and former president of the Alumni Association, John Becker ’01. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11.

As Hrabowski prepares for his retirement as UMBC’s president, mentees like Cornish are reminding the higher education community of one of his legacies. No, not UMBC’s transformation from a young state university to U.S. News & World Report’s No. 1 “Up and Coming University” in the nation. That one’s been well documented. And no, not how he helped UMBC become a powerhouse in STEM education and the alma mater for thousands of engineers and scientists of color. That also has prompted some chatter. 

This legacy involves his impact on other chancellors and presidents, along with those who aspire to these roles. In his 30 years as UMBC president, Hrabowski has counseled scores of his peers, including Sylvia Burwell, president of American University; Paula Johnson, president of Wellesley College; and Wendy Raymond, president of Haverford College. He also has taught for 18 years at the week-long Harvard Seminar for New Presidents, which provides a crash course in higher education leadership. And he has mentored countless college and university heads—officially, unofficially, and sometimes without him even knowing it.

James Clements ’85, M.S. ’91, Ph.D. ’93, serves as president of Clemson University. Photo courtesy of Clemson University.

Hrabowski gave Cornish his cell phone number—along with the promise that she could use it at any time—within weeks of her appointment as interim president at Ithaca in August 2021. She hasn’t needed to use it. But knowing that it’s in her phone gives her a sense of comfort.  “He has always been a relational president,” she said. “That’s the one thing about him that stands out for me. I want to be that kind of relational leader—dare I say that kind of servant leader, because that’s what I see in him.”

“I would not be a president if not for him,” said James P. Clements ’85, computer science, M.S. ’91, Ph.D. ’93, operations analysis, who has led Clemson University since 2013. “I have modeled my career after him.” 

Had Hrabowski been a fly on the wall during those conversations, he would have brushed aside the accolades, then launched into a speech-slash-sermon about how everyone is capable of greatness, how it’s about the students, not the leader. “He would say that he isn’t that rare,” Cornish said. “He would say that there are other people who, given the opportunity and access, could accomplish just as much as he has and more.”

His imagined protestations notwithstanding, though, it does raise an interesting question: Can a college president learn to lead like Freeman Hrabowski? Are such talents innate or are they teachable?

Said Clements bluntly: “He’s special. Everybody who interacts with him knows it.”

“There is only one Freeman and you can’t be him or become him,” said James Honan, senior lecturer in the Harvard Graduate School of Education. “But when you hear him speak, when he answers your questions, when you watch his role modeling, you can incorporate some practices into your leadership that will help you make your institution better.”

No. 1: Take care of yourself.
No. 2: Be authentic.
No. 3: Own your mistakes.

College and university presidents come to Hrabowski so often for advice that the words come tripping off his tongue when he’s asked to recreate what he tells them. In his mind, they’re just things he has learned over the years—sometimes by watching others, sometimes through trial and error. Part of it, he believes, came from his time as a child leader in the civil rights movement in Birmingham, Alabama. One of his role models then was a preacher renowned for his ability to galvanize support and inspire a revolution: the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

“I was very fortunate to have experiences that gave me the chance to lead,” said Hrabowski, who was arrested for his participation in the Children’s Crusade march at age 12. “Each of us is a product of our childhood and young experiences, and those experiences shape who we are, what we like, what we don’t like, how we adjust to change, how we address challenges, how we act in the storm.” 

Hrabowski practices what he preaches to the leaders he advises. He follows rule No. 1—taking care of himself—by meditating via the Calm app every day with his wife, Jacqueline Coleman Hrabowski. No. 2, being authentic, just comes naturally to him. And he may take No. 3, owning his mistakes, more seriously than any college president in the world.

Consider, for instance, this story from 2018—26 years into Hrabowski’s tenure as president. At an event honoring several high academic achievers, it seems he spent a little too much time bragging about UMBC’s first Rhodes Scholar, Naomi Mburu ’18, M26, chemical engineering, who is now at Oxford University working on heat transfer applications for nuclear fusion reactors. The others on stage felt slighted by his fawning words for Mburu.

Mburu with Dr. Gymama Slaughter in her lab at UMBC in 2018. Marlayna Demond ’11.

How does he know this? Because Mburu came to his office and told him so, an act that required her to summon both justice and mercy. Hrabowski was alarmed by her words, which he recognized were true the moment he heard her speak them. He had indeed failed to give enough attention to all the scholars on stage. “I’ve always taken great pride in working to let every person know how much I appreciate them, that they matter,” he said. “And there I was, without even realizing it, not holding up to my own standard.”

So he called each one, apologized, and asked to hear their stories. According to Hrabowski: “It was a lesson for me: Don’t allow my excitement about one person to take away from helping each [honoree] feel her best.”

That may be Hrabowski’s lesson learned. But the larger one for leaders of higher education institutions is the importance of being open to constructive feedback and criticism, especially if it comes from a student. Leaders who reflect on their failures more than their successes are the ones who experience real growth, said Honan. 

“Leadership is a practice,” he said. “It doesn’t always work out. One makes mistakes. There are failures. And I think Freeman can help people see that through his own self-reflection in a very powerful way. And when it comes from a distinguished president, that’s even more powerful.” 

Perhaps he took Mburu’s feedback more seriously because she was a student. When Clements was a young faculty member at nearby Towson University, he would often find himself at events where Hrabowski was speaking. It was clear that students were his priority, Clements said. “I listened to his words. I watched his heart. And I saw how he cared so much about making a difference in people’s lives,” he said. “He is driven by helping other people succeed by giving them a better life, by giving them a better path.” 

Hrabowski has but one non-negotiable tenet for leading a college or university: Students come first. “I don’t think there’s any role we have as educators that’s more important than connecting meaningfully to our students and to each other,” he said. “We prepare them not simply to work on biochemistry but to decide who they are, what’s important to them. What are their habits of mind? How do they think about different issues? How do they approach problems? How do they think about the world? About their place in the world?”

Teachable Moments

Over the years, though, Hrabowski has found himself dealing with the less romantic side of higher education, as college presidents invariably do. Those situations also create teachable moments for his peers—including one that became a case study for Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.

During a state funding crisis in the 1990s, leaders at UMBC and other state-run universities in Maryland had to find creative ways to offset the losses. Hrabowski turned to the then little-known UMBC Board of Visitors, a sleepy advisory committee that met sporadically and whose membership had dwindled to just three. He revitalized the board by appointing 20 prominent leaders in Baltimore, each of whom received a firsthand look at the momentum building at the university. They also got a close-up look at the young, dynamic president who was promising great things for UMBC and its students. 

The board—dubbed “Friends of Freeman” by Sheldon Caplis, then the vice president of Institutional Advancement—became a link to millions in private dollars, which helped refill the coffers during brutal times financially. “You’ve got to build relationships, and it’s even more critical when you don’t come from a private school with wealthy trustees or wealthy alumni when you’re really building from the ground up,” said Caplis, who taught alongside Hrabowski at Harvard’s Institute for Management and Leadership in Education for several years. Caplis said that as the pair recounted the “Friends of Freeman” story to the group, much head shaking and laughter would ensue—as though it were some magic trick that only Freeman Hrabowski could pull off. 

“These were new presidents, so a lot of them didn’t have any fundraising experience,” Caplis said. “So they really wanted to know, ‘Well, how do you interact?’” 

Again, it raises the question of whether you can teach someone to lead like Freeman A. Hrabowski, III. But at the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter whether it’s nature or nurture, this amalgam of personality traits allowed him to reinvent UMBC and go down in history as one of higher education’s best leaders. Forums like the new presidents seminar are simply a way to “peel back the onion a little bit,” said Greg Simmons, M.P.P. ’04, the current vice president of Institutional Advancement and Hrabowski’s most recent teaching partner at the Harvard seminar. The same goes for college presidents like Cornish, Clements, and others who are fortunate enough to receive his mentoring.

“They don’t have to be Freeman,” Simmons said. “They’ve just got to know how to work with other people in a really effective, genuine, human kind of way. That’s Freeman’s real gift.” 

Clements said he has met people across the country who consider Hrabowski their mentor. And that, he said, has a multiplying effect that defies calculation.

“We’re trying to make a difference like he did,” Clements said. “It amplifies his impact because of how he’s helped so many other leaders and how he’s shown us how to lead. It allows us to change more lives based on what we saw him do. It goes way beyond UMBC.”

By Roberto Yus, assistant professor, Computer Science, UMBC, and Primal Pappachan, Penn State

Have you ever felt a creeping sensation that someone’s watching you? Then you turn around and you don’t see anything out of the ordinary. Depending on where you were, though, you might not have been completely imagining it. There are billions of things sensing you every day. They are everywhere, hidden in plain sight – inside your TV, fridge, car and office. These things know more about you than you might imagine, and many of them communicate that information over the internet.

Back in 2007, it would have been hard to imagine the revolution of useful apps and services that smartphones ushered in. But they came with a cost in terms of intrusiveness and loss of privacy. As computer scientists who study data management and privacy, we find that with internet connectivity extended to devices in homes, offices and cities, privacy is in more danger than ever.

Internet of Things

Your appliances, car and home are designed to make your life easier and automate tasks you perform daily: switch lights on and off when you enter and exit a room, remind you that your tomatoes are about to go bad, personalize the temperature of the house depending on the weather and preferences of each person in the household.

To do their magic, they need the internet to reach out for help and correlate data. Without internet access, your smart thermostat can collect data about you, but it doesn’t know what the weather forecast is, and it isn’t powerful enough to process all of the information to decide what to do.

The Nest smart thermostat tracks your presence and is connected to the internet. Smart Home Perfected/Flickr, CC BY

But it’s not just the things in your home that are communicating over the internet. Workplaces, malls and cities are also becoming smarter, and the smart devices in those places have similar requirements. In fact, the Internet of Things (IoT) is already widely used in transport and logistics, agriculture and farming, and industry automation. There were around 22 billion internet-connected devices in use around the world in 2018, and the number is projected to grow to over 50 billion by 2030.

What these things know about you

Smart devices collect a wide range of data about their users. Smart security cameras and smart assistants are, in the end, cameras and microphones in your home that collect video and audio information about your presence and activities. On the less obvious end of the spectrum, things like smart TVs use cameras and microphones to spy on users, smart lightbulbs track your sleep and heart rate, and smart vacuum cleaners recognize objects in your home and map every inch of it.

Sometimes, this surveillance is marketed as a feature. For example, some Wi-Fi routers can collect information about users’ whereabouts in the home and even coordinate with other smart devices to sense motion.

Manufacturers typically promise that only automated decision-making systems and not humans see your data. But this isn’t always the case. For example, Amazon workers listen to some conversations with Alexa, transcribe them and annotate them, before feeding them into automated decision-making systems.

But even limiting access to personal data to automated decision making systems can have unwanted consequences. Any private data that is shared over the internet could be vulnerable to hackers anywhere in the world, and few consumer internet-connected devices are very secure.

Understand your vulnerabilities

With some devices, like smart speakers or cameras, users can occasionally turn them off for privacy. However, even when this is an option, disconnecting the devices from the internet can severely limit their usefulness. You also don’t have that option when you’re in workspaces, malls or smart cities, so you could be vulnerable even if you don’t own smart devices.

Therefore, as a user, it is important to make an informed decision by understanding the trade-offs between privacy and comfort when buying, installing and using an internet-connected device. This is not always easy. Studies have shown that, for example, owners of smart home personal assistants have an incomplete understanding of what data the devices collect, where the data is stored and who can access it.

Smart speakers continuously listen for your commands. Oscar Wong/Moment via Getty Images

Governments all over the world have introduced laws to protect privacy and give people more control over their data. Some examples are the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Thanks to this, for instance, you can submit a Data Subject Access Request (DSAR) to the organization that collects your data from an internet-connected device. The organizations are required to respond to requests within those jurisdictions within a month explaining what data is collected, how it is used within the organization and whether it is shared with any third parties.

Limit the privacy damage

Regulations are an important step; however, their enforcement is likely to take a while to catch up with the ever-increasing population of internet-connected devices. In the meantime, there are things you can do to take advantage of some of the benefits of internet-connected without giving away an inordinate amount of personal data.

If you own a smart device, you can take steps to secure it and minimize risks to your privacy. The Federal Trade Commission offers suggestions on how to secure your internet-connected devices. Two key steps are updating the device’s firmware regularly and going through its settings and disabling any data collection that is not related to what you want the device to do. The Online Trust Alliance provides additional tips and a checklist for consumers to ensure safe and private use of consumer internet-connected devices.

If you are on the fence about purchasing an internet-connected device, find out what data it captures and what the manufacturer’s data management policies are from independent sources such as Mozilla’s Privacy Not Included. By using this information, you can opt for a version of the smart device you want from a manufacturer that takes the privacy of its users seriously.

*****

Roberto Yus, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, University of Maryland Baltimore County and

Primal Pappachan, Postdoctoral Scholar in Computer Science, Penn State

Header Image: Appliances that make your life easier could also put your privacy at risk. Eric Kayne/AP Images for Samsung

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Western culture remains terrified of aging, particularly for women, but that fear doesn’t stop any of us from actually aging. Kathy Marmor, associate professor of visual arts at UMBC, delves into the heart of these anxieties with a pair of innovative collaborative works, collectively titled Beyond Midlife: What’s Lost, What’s Gained, on view at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (CADVC) on the UMBC campus through March 12. 

Marmor’s new work appears as part of the CADVC’s Spectrum: 2022 Visual Arts Faculty exhibition, which also features works by UMBC visual arts faculty Lisa Moren and Lynn Cazabon. 

While Marmor typically works alone, in recent years she’s begun a series of collaborations. “I thought it would be interesting to work with women from UMBC. [Penny Rheingans] and I had talked about working together when I first came to UMBC, but timelines didn’t work out.” Marmor said. “I knew Robin [Farabaugh] as a writer and I really wanted to work with a writer because I often use text in my work. The timing was good for them both.”  

Unspooling is a textile-based installation created with Rheingans—a former professor of computer science and director of the Center for Women in Technology at UMBC who is now on the faculty at the University of Maine. 

“I’ve worked for a long time with technology, using computers to mediate the environment, using sensors and interaction with people’s presence,” said Marmor. “This new work is a pause or break from technology. We wanted people to come in and get a different sense of the body. We see that there’s a decay, or a sense of unspooling, and unwrapping of daily life.”

Rheingans, an accomplished knitter, added new dimensions to the work. 

“She’s a fabulous knitter, and a dedicated collector,” said Marmor. “She gave me all these materials to work with. I fell in love with yarn. It’s a really accessible material, fun to work with and it hinged on craft. My work has always been tactile and sculptural, but this was change for me.” 

Comprising four vivid mixed-media sculptures, the piece charts vulnerabilities of aging women, including cognition, reproduction, appearance, self and autonomy. Echoing Suzanne Valadon’s “The Blue Room,” which depicts a middle-aged woman reclining on a day bed, together the pieces form an abstract portrait of a complete body. 

“The Blue Room’ is one of my favorite paintings by a woman about being a woman, present and in her body,” Marmor says. 

The second piece, Philomela’s Thread: a Commonplace book, was created with Robin Farabaugh, an essayist and former senior lecturer in UMBC’s English department. Consisting of ten prints and a single channel video, the pieces draw on the classic Greek tragedy of Philomela, a princess who was violently silenced. 

“I really wanted to work with a writer because I often use text in my work,” said Marmor. “[Farabaugh] had never worked with a visual artist before, so it was an adventure.” 

Historically, commonplace books were kept by men as personal compendiums of knowledge. Notable men like John Locke and Thomas Jefferson were famous for their commonplace books as reference works and historical documents. Women, Marmor notes, also kept commonplace books, but they tended to serve a different purpose. 

“Women were taught to read, but not allowed to go on with education, so one way in which women taught themselves and had a sense of themselves is by keeping commonplace books,” said Marmor. “They’d put many things in them, recipes, letters, scriptures, writings and poems they would come across, these miscellanies of their lives. That’s how women understood themselves.”

The ten prints in Philomela’s Thread combine abstract images that simultaneously recall Hilma af Klint and Alexander Calder, peppered with Farabaugh’s text. 

“Robin wrote these beautiful words which we distilled so that each one is about paper, thread and voice through the centuries,” said Marmor. “I really wanted to make it clear that the way in which women have recorded the stories of their lives has changed over time. We depicted the digital stylus to ask how will the life experiences of women be preserved now in this contemporary digital age?”

The four-minute video loop that stands as the centerpiece of Philomela’s Thread takes a more linear narrative form, centering on a story of love and loss. 

“It’s moving through the story of a woman’s desire for her sexuality, getting older, and then the loss of her family. I think it really captures our understanding of the world, like a memory, or an inner space,” said Marmor. 

Marmor’s work remains on display through March 12, with a closing reception 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. March 10. For those who are unable to visit the gallery in person, the entire Spectrum 2022 exhibition can be viewed via the CADVC website. 

Header image: Philomela’s Thread: a Commonplace Book — 10 gouache and giclee prints that depict a multiplicity of threads that make up a woman’s life and a single channel video that voices to her inner thoughts. Photo by Heather Braxton.