Math is Julie Granruth’s love language. It has bookmarked her life, starting as a student at Towson High School, where her master tutoring skills made what sometimes looked like a labyrinth of numbers accessible and fun for other students. This caught the attention of Donatella Spigarelli, a mom of one of the students—and a certified public accountant and an audit and accounting principal at Baltimore-based accounting firm Ellin & Tucker. Spigarelli was so impressed with Granruth that she encouraged her to apply to the firm’s college internship program. After three years and an accounting internship, Julie is graduating with a degree in financial economics, a 4.0 GPA, and a job as a tax and audit associate at Ellin & Tucker. 

Q: What led you to study at UMBC?

A: My journey to UMBC, I would say, was a little bit different. When I was about 10 or 12, my middle brother was very interested in chess and played in many tournaments at UMBC. I came with him throughout middle school and high school, experiencing UMBC at a very young age. When I applied to colleges, I discovered that UMBC had a great financial economics program. Combined with my experience of UMBC’s community as a kid, it became one of my top picks. 

Q: Is your love of math a family affair?

A: Growing up, our parents always taught us to save all of our money and only buy what we needed. I took that to heart and became interested in math, especially in the global impact of the actions of individuals on the economy. There was a direct application to the real world. 

I chose financial economics because the passion with which my economics professors taught and how they applied it to their research made me passionate about it, too. I enjoyed watching them express their enjoyment of economics. It helped me better understand my enjoyment of it as well.

Q: What’s an unexpected thing you love about your major?

A: I’m a very technical and analytical person. I now love working in Excel, especially for my accounting classes. In my first accounting class, I was assigned a group project to create a company and work out its financial statements. That’s when I learned the most about how to work in Excel. I developed the skills and cool tricks that made spreadsheets work fast and efficiently. Last semester, in advanced accounting, I analyzed the financial ratios of different companies and used the Excel skills I learned to compare their performance.

I visualized everything and organized things in a way that made sense to me and then explained it to someone else in a way that they understood it. That’s why, after graduation, I want to continue my education and become a Certified Public Accountant. I’ve always been interested in it, but I wasn’t always 100 percent sure until last summer during my accounting internship. Helping people save money on their company taxes or their personal taxes is something I’m really interested in doing.

Q: What advice do you have for students interested in financial economics or becoming a CPA but aren’t sure it’s for them?

A: I have frequently heard students say that a lack of confidence in math is the main reason they don’t pursue either of these paths. My advice is to take advantage of all the opportunities you have. Never be afraid to ask for help. The professors are very welcoming and kind and will be able to help you in any way they can. A big part of economics is relating it to the real world. If you’re interested in talking about theories and policies, which is why I chose economics, math is just one piece of the equation. I don’t think there’s a ceiling, even if numbers aren’t your best friend!

Q: Where did you find the most sense of community while at UMBC?

A: I have had a passion for economics since high school and was eager to join a group of people with similar passions. The Economics Council of Majors was a community that welcomed me during my freshman year. I came to love this community, and as treasurer and then as president,  I helped shape and lead the future of this group I loved.

I also enjoyed the Student Events Board (seb). I was grateful to have so many amazing friends who inspired me to put myself out there and join this community. I became the vice president of internal programming; I had never taken on such a large role in my community—I was intimidated. However, once I realized the impact I could have, I never felt more comfortable surrounded by peers who shared my interests. 

During events, when I spoke with attendees about our related hobbies, watched groups of strangers become friends over a shared interest, and collaborated with other campus organizations, I was inspired to pursue new passions. These experiences revealed something I hadn’t originally considered. While the events we created were intended to form the UMBC community that we wished to see, I have also felt the warmth of this community as those around me expressed their heartfelt enjoyment of my programs. I felt so welcomed by the leaders of seb in my freshman year, and I felt honored that I had a role in the way new and returning students experienced UMBC and its beautiful community.

Q: How have you dealt with challenging moments at UMBC? 

A: Despite new classes that seemed impossibly difficult, changes in my social sphere and goals, and my peers seeming farther ahead than I was, one thing that has never changed is my persistence and passion.

When I first faced defeat, I felt not only the fear of that defeat but also the fear of future defeats. However, through my persistence, defeat became somewhat of a friend, someone I turned to as I reclaimed my footing and approached the problem time and time again, unafraid to ask for help to do my best. I take my defeats as starting points for future growth. I now hold onto them as fond memories and stories of strength.

This is why, since the spring of my freshman year, I worked hard every semester as a teaching assistant. I understood how easy it was to let academic troubles envelop me and how it seemed easier to seal this envelope than to change the script and deliver a new message. Having gone through this myself, I became passionate about helping students bring out the best in themselves. I showed them that one defeat was not just a defeat. It was an opportunity for greater future success. 

Q: Carry over the one. What place have numbers had in your community service?

A: One of the students I tutored at Catonsville Elementary School was very numbers-oriented. The first question she asked me when I met her was, ‘What’s six times six?’ Talking about our love of numbers opened a way for me to communicate with her during the mentoring process. 

Since my freshman year, I have volunteered as a Shriver Living Learning Community mentor at Catonsville Elementary School. I acted as someone between a friend and an adult they could look up to, yet also relate to. I encouraged my students to take pride in who they were and reminded them that they only had one chance in life to be who they are, so they might as well own it. 

As the student leader for this site, I supervised the registration, onboarding, evaluation, and weekly attendance of 20 UMBC student volunteers throughout the year. This meant staying organized—it always came back to spreadsheets!

The best part of my UMBC experience was the privilege of engaging with so many communities and giving back to them with my time. I believe that service to those beyond ourselves is part of what makes our lives so fulfilling, and I can not imagine a life without it.

Read more Commencement 2025 stories.

The following message was shared with the UMBC community on April 28 to announce the naming of a new interim dean for the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences:

* * * * *

Dear UMBC Community, 

As you probably are aware, the current dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (CAHSS), Kimberly Moffitt, will be leaving UMBC this summer to join Howard University. I am excited to announce that John Stolle-McAllister has been appointed interim dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences effective July 1. John brings two-and-a-half decades of experience at UMBC to his new role. He is a professor of modern languages, linguistics, and intercultural communication and currently serves as chair.

John previously served as associate dean in CAHSS from 2014 to 2022, and in that role he focused on student success initiatives, including creating the CAHSS advising center, collaboratively designing classroom renovations, leading the college’s response to COVID, and organizing faculty participation in the Planning Instructional Variety for Online Teaching (PIVOT) program.

John earned his bachelor’s from Bates College, and he received his master’s in Hispanic literatures and Ph.D. in comparative studies of discourse and society from the University of Minnesota. His research and teaching interests include multilingualism, cultural change, environmental issues, and social movements in Latin America.

A national search for a permanent dean will be conducted over the next year. I have asked Ana Oskoz, vice provost for faculty affairs, to chair the search committee. Isaacson Miller will support UMBC in this search for the next dean for CAHSS.

Please join me in welcoming John to his new role as interim dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. 

Sincerely, 

Manfred H.M. van Dulmen

Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs

UMBC has received a $1.2 million solar energy grant from the Maryland Energy Administration (MEA) to support solar power installations on campus and other sustainability initiatives. 

The funding will enable construction of solar canopies over the north portion of the Stadium Lot. Rooftop solar arrays will be mounted on UMBC’s central receiving warehouse, located adjacent to the lot. The installations will be highly visible to the UMBC community and members of the public attending events at the Chesapeake Employers Insurance Arena. 

Together, these solar installations will generate 1,000 kWAC of clean, carbon-free energy, or about 2.5 percent of UMBC’s current annual electricity. The solar panels’ output will reduce UMBC’s carbon footprint by roughly 500 tons per year and earn Solar Renewable Energy Credits from the state of Maryland, which can be sold to power companies. The combined savings from the electricity generation and accompanying SRECs may save UMBC $200,000 to $300,000 annually.

“This solar energy project is a significant step forward for UMBC to reach its sustainability goals, and will benefit our campus and local communities,” Taylor Smith, assistant director in the Office of Sustainability, says. “For the first time, the university will generate a significant amount of clean, renewable electricity right here on campus.  We are lucky to have a community of partners that made this happen.”

Beyond solar

The grant will also support the development of UMBC’s Campus Clean Energy Master Plan (CCEMP). The CCEMP will rely on past studies and a forthcoming decarbonization engineering study to identify opportunities to save energy and decarbonize campus energy systems, including the central and satellite utility plants.

UMBC’s geography and environmental systems department and engineering faculty affiliated with the Grand Challenges Scholars Program are designing new learning opportunities that will use the solar project as an educational tool. Grant funds will partially fund academic experiences that provide students with hands-on learning opportunities in solar energy technology, renewable energy systems, and sustainability management, integrating real-world problem-solving into the academic curriculum. Five interns will also gain critical experience through supporting these projects, under the supervision of the Office of Sustainability and departmental faculty.

“The campus community can be proud of this commitment to bring solar energy to campus,” Smith says. “This project will not only accelerate UMBC’s shift to clean energy but will also create a visible, tangible symbol of the progress that’s been made. Plus, the new solar arrays will create learning opportunities for students to build the skills they need to thrive in the green economy.”

Written by Manas Gaur, assistant professor in computer science and electrical engineering, UMBC

ChatGPT and other AI chatbots based on large language models are known to occasionally make things up, including scientific and legal citations. It turns out that measuring how accurate an AI model’s citations are is a good way of assessing the model’s reasoning abilities.

An AI model “reasons” by breaking down a query into steps and working through them in order. Think of how you learned to solve math word problems in school.

Ideally, to generate citations an AI model would understand the key concepts in a document, generate a ranked list of relevant papers to cite, and provide convincing reasoning for how each suggested paper supports the corresponding text. It would highlight specific connections between the text and the cited research, clarifying why each source matters.

The question is, can today’s models be trusted to make these connections and provide clear reasoning that justifies their source choices? The answer goes beyond citation accuracy to address how useful and accurate large language models are for any information retrieval purpose.

I’m a computer scientist. My colleagues − researchers from the AI Institute at the University of South Carolina, Ohio State University and University of Maryland Baltimore County − and I have developed the Reasons benchmark to test how well large language models can automatically generate research citations and provide understandable reasoning.

We used the benchmark to compare the performance of two popular AI reasoning models, DeepSeek’s R1 and OpenAI’s o1. Though DeepSeek made headlines with its stunning efficiency and cost-effectiveness, the Chinese upstart has a way to go to match OpenAI’s reasoning performance.

Sentence specific

The accuracy of citations has a lot to do with whether the AI model is reasoning about information at the sentence level rather than paragraph or document level. Paragraph-level and document-level citations can be thought of as throwing a large chunk of information into a large language model and asking it to provide many citations.

In this process, the large language model overgeneralizes and misinterprets individual sentences. The user ends up with citations that explain the whole paragraph or document, not the relatively fine-grained information in the sentence.

Further, reasoning suffers when you ask the large language model to read through an entire document. These models mostly rely on memorizing patterns that they typically are better at finding at the beginning and end of longer texts than in the middle. This makes it difficult for them to fully understand all the important information throughout a long document.

Large language models get confused because paragraphs and documents hold a lot of information, which affects citation generation and the reasoning process. Consequently, reasoning from large language models over paragraphs and documents becomes more like summarizing or paraphrasing.

The Reasons benchmark addresses this weakness by examining large language models’ citation generation and reasoning.

Testing citations and reasoning

Following the release of DeepSeek R1 in January 2025, we wanted to examine its accuracy in generating citations and its quality of reasoning and compare it with OpenAI’s o1 model. We created a paragraph that had sentences from different sources, gave the models individual sentences from this paragraph, and asked for citations and reasoning.

To start our test, we developed a small test bed of about 4,100 research articles around four key topics that are related to human brains and computer science: neurons and cognition, human-computer interaction, databases and artificial intelligence. We evaluated the models using two measures: F-1 score, which measures how accurate the provided citation is, and hallucination rate, which measures how sound the model’s reasoning is − that is, how often it produces an inaccurate or misleading response.

Our testing revealed significant performance differences between OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek R1 across different scientific domains. OpenAI’s o1 did well connecting information between different subjects, such as understanding how research on neurons and cognition connects to human-computer interaction and then to concepts in artificial intelligence, while remaining accurate. Its performance metrics consistently outpaced DeepSeek R1’s across all evaluation categories, especially in reducing hallucinations and successfully completing assigned tasks.

OpenAI o1 was better at combining ideas semantically, whereas R1 focused on making sure it generated a response for every attribution task, which in turn increased hallucination during reasoning. OpenAI o1 had a hallucination rate of approximately 35% compared with DeepSeek R1’s rate of nearly 85% in the attribution-based reasoning task.

In terms of accuracy and linguistic competence, OpenAI o1 scored about 0.65 on the F-1 test, which means it was right about 65% of the time when answering questions. It also scored about 0.70 on the BLEU test, which measures how well a language model writes in natural language. These are pretty good scores.

DeepSeek R1 scored lower, with about 0.35 on the F-1 test, meaning it was right about 35% of the time. However, its BLEU score was only about 0.2, which means its writing wasn’t as natural-sounding as OpenAI’s o1. This shows that o1 was better at presenting that information in clear, natural language.

OpenAI holds the advantage

On other benchmarks, DeepSeek R1 performs on par with OpenAI o1 on math, coding and scientific reasoning tasks. But the substantial difference on our benchmark suggests that o1 provides more reliable information, while R1 struggles with factual consistency.

Though we included other models in our comprehensive testing, the performance gap between o1 and R1 specifically highlights the current competitive landscape in AI development, with OpenAI’s offering maintaining a significant advantage in reasoning and knowledge integration capabilities.

These results suggest that OpenAI still has a leg up when it comes to source attribution and reasoning, possibly due to the nature and volume of the data it was trained on. The company recently announced its deep research tool, which can create reports with citations, ask follow-up questions and provide reasoning for the generated response.

The jury is still out on the tool’s value for researchers, but the caveat remains for everyone: Double-check all citations an AI gives you.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article and see more than 250 UMBC articles available in The Conversation.

When associate professor of visual arts Kelley Bell thinks back to her childhood growing up in the Capitol Hill area of Washington, D.C., she recalls fond memories of playing in her neighborhood playground, locally dubbed as “Turtle Park.”

“I remembered the concrete structures behind the turtle in the playground and it really inspired me to want to figure out how they came to be,” Bell says. 

The public park, officially named Marion Park, was given the “Turtle Park” moniker because of the large concrete turtle structure that lived in the center of its playground, designed by Virginia Dortch Dorazio in 1953. Bell, M.F.A. ’06, imaging and digital arts, remembers Turtle Park as a prominent staple of her adolescence and decades later, the park also acts as the inspiration behind her latest project “Fantastic Village,” which will be on display at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) from April 27 through July 27 as part of the museum’s Baker Artist Awards exhibition. 

The power of design

Bell was a 2024 recipient of the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance’s Baker Artist Award. The BMA exhibit will feature 20 works from five recent Baker Artist Award recipients, including Bell’s “Fantastic Village.” The colorful geometries of Bell’s installation draw on memories of now-demolished playgrounds of her youth in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore’s iconic rowhomes, bridging together the two places she calls home. 

Bell creates vibrant projection-mapping works on a grand scale and gallery installations that emphasize joy, playfulness, community, and human connection. Before pursuing her current career as a visual artist, designer, and educator, Bell initially thought she’d be a lawyer. She believed that since her father was a speechwriter for President Gerald Ford and her mother was a teacher, she’d continue the family’s lineage of public service work. 

However, “drawing in class was always a problem with me to the degree that it’s written on a lot of my report cards, saying, ‘Kelley has a lot of attention issues.’ I never thought of art as a career,” says Bell.

Growing up in the nation’s capital, Bell was heavily influenced by the city’s independent music scene. During her wanderings through downtown Washington as a teenager, a chance encounter with a repurposed “five and dime” store (then home to the Washington Project for the Arts) changed everything.

“When I walked in that store, I never saw anything like it,” Bell recalls, “There were zines, posters, paintings, and tapes for bands all around. It was a window into this idea that art doesn’t have to be this picture on the wall and that was an amazing idea to me even at a young age.”

After graduating from Pratt, Bell landed a designer role for a record pressing plant that worked with dance music labels. Continuing her work in the entertainment industry, she freelanced for MTV Networks for several years before she was encouraged to explore Baltimore after a recommendation from a fellow designer who boasted about the city’s arts scene. A one-day exploration of the city convinced Bell that Baltimore was the place for her.

Bell was accepted into the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York where she initially majored in illustration. But once there, she was introduced to the concept and the power of design. “A friend explained that designers construct the existing world, and I believe that’s an amazing power to have. I quickly switched my major after that,” says Bell.

In 1997, Bell moved into Baltimore’s now-defunct H&H Arts Building, a five-story warehouse where local artists lived and worked for more than two decades. It was at H&H where Bell was initially connected toperformer and fellow UMBC alum Beatrix “Trixie Little” Burneston ’99, visual and performing arts, a founding member of Fluid Movement, a Baltimore-based organization that utilizes public spaces to create joy and community through performance art that most notably includes quirky water ballet performances in Baltimore City public pools.

“Fluid Movement did a rendition of the opera ‘Carmen’ with hotdogs on sticks. They designed a stage and costumes for hotdogs and had a composer to do the score,” shares Bell. “To see people pour that much love and effort into something that ultimately is incredibly silly and unusual is, to me, a heroic act.”

Bell worked with Fluid Movement as a designer and the group then became a long-time client that she worked with throughout the years. Bell has also collaborated with a number of organizations and art collectives across Baltimore, including working with the Enoch Pratt Library and the community art space Creative Alliance. Bell’s project “The Clock Strikes 100,” a series of short animations designed for and projected within the Baltimore’s historic Bromo Seltzer Art Tower, was designated “Best Public Artwork” in Baltimore Magazine’s “Best of Baltimore 2011” issue.

“Projections, Inflatables, and Artistic Spectacles”

Bell’s first introduction to UMBC was on a snowy day in 2001. Her friends recommended UMBC’s campus as a great place for sledding due to the campus’ hilly landscape. Soon after, Bell decided to expand her skillset and enrolled in UMBC’s M.F.A program. 

“I was like a kid in a candy store with all of the stuff that I could do. It was a new world being opened up to me,” says Bell.

After experiencing difficulties in executing her thesis project to her satisfaction, Bell was advised by her then-thesis chair Preminda Jacob to consider extending her time in the program for an additional year. 

“That extra year was the year that I figured out projection mapping. Doing guerilla projection projects changed the way that I thought about making art. That has been a form of art that’s served me since I’ve graduated from UMBC and it was all because of that fourth year,” says Bell. Guerilla projection mapping—the use of projectors to display images, animations, or videos onto various surfaces in public spaces without formal authorization or permits—helped to inform the foundation of Bell’s artistic pursuits.  

Bell’s large-scale projection-mapping works and public installations have been featured in national and international festivals for almost two decades. Among her notable works include “The Herd,” a 2018 installation that was part of Light City Festival in Baltimore City. The project featured more than 300 solar powered inflatables that were placed into Baltimore’s Inner Harbor as a call to action for healthy waterways in the harbor. 

In addition to her artistic practice, Bell has been an educator at UMBC since 2008. Earlier this year, Bell presented a retrospective of her work and her research practice with the presentation “Projections, Inflatables, and Artistic Spectacles,” organized by the UMBC’s Center for Innovation, Research, and Creativity in the Arts (CIRCA). 

“The CIRCA talk was a breakthrough. It was the first time that I took in the full scope of starting with an M.F.A. and how that work led up to the BMA exhibit,” she says. 

The motivation behind Bell’s BMA exhibit “Fantastic Village” largely stemmed from her collaboration with UMBC theater professor Collete Searls on the “Enchanted Jangle” installation that was part of the 2024 Sweaty Eyeballs: Animation Adjacent gallery exhibition, curated by Corrie Parks, associate professor of visual arts. The installation is described as an “epic cardboard fort your five-year-old self dreamed of.”

“There’s a playfulness about it but also a deeply-weird and creepy aspect to it. This is the place I like to dwell—giving people something new and something that they can’t figure out is something that is very important to me in my work.”

The following message was shared with the UMBC community on April 21 to announce the naming of a new dean for the College of Engineering and Information Technology:

* * * * *

Dear UMBC community,

I am pleased to announce the appointment of Jeanne M. VanBriesen as the dean of the College of Engineering and Information Technology (COEIT) effective July 1. Jeanne is a distinguished academic leader with a bold vision for the future of engineering and information technology research and education and a commitment to inclusive excellence.

Jeanne joins UMBC from Carnegie Mellon University where she is the Duquesne Light Company Professor in the departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Engineering and Public Policy. She recently completed service as the division director in the Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport Systems, in the Engineering Directorate, at the U.S. National Science Foundation. She previously served as the vice provost for faculty at Carnegie Mellon and as the chair of the faculty senate.

Jeanne holds a bachelor’s in education and a master’s and Ph.D. in civil engineering from Northwestern University. She is a licensed professional engineer, a board certified environmental engineer, and a diplomate of water resources engineering.

An accomplished scholar, Jeanne has published more than 75 scientific articles and given more than 200 professional presentations. Her research, which has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, the Colcom Foundation, the Heinz Endowments, the Packard Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Infrastructure Technology Alliance, focuses on environmental systems, including biotransformation of recalcitrant organics, detection of biological agents in drinking water and natural water systems, speciation-driven biogeochemistry of chelating agents and disinfection by-products, and environmental impacts of energy extraction.

An award-winning educator, visionary leader, and active mentor, Jeanne has supervised 24 Ph.D. dissertations and numerous M.S. theses. She has served on several boards, including the U.S. EPA Science Advisory Board, and she is a fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Environmental Water Resources Institute, the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

I want to give a special thanks to Bill LaCourse and the dedicated members of the search committee for their efforts in conducting a comprehensive national search.

I am excited for Jeanne to join UMBC and build on the tradition of integrating undergraduate and graduate education, research, innovation, and service to address evolving global needs. Please join me in welcoming Jeanne to the UMBC community.

Anupam Joshi Named Special Assistant to the Provost for AI and Computing

I am also pleased to announce an exciting opportunity for Anupam Joshi, who selflessly served as the interim dean for the past two years. In addition to his current roles as the Oros Family Professor and director of UMBC Cybersecurity Institute, Anupam will be transitioning to a new role as the special assistant to the Provost for AI and Computing. In this role Anupam will lead UMBC’s strategy for AI and Computing including coordinating and leveraging current efforts in this space, lead the strategic planning for university goals in this area, and leverage new resources and university partnerships.

Anupam is a renowned expert in cybersecurity, AI, and data science. He brings decades of leadership, research excellence, and visionary thinking to this new role. His appointment marks an exciting chapter for UMBC as we expand our efforts to drive innovation, foster interdisciplinary collaboration, and shape the future of ethical and impactful AI on campus, across the USM, and around the globe.

Please join me in congratulating Anupam on this well-deserved recognition. I look forward to the continued growth and success of the AI and computing programs under his leadership.

Sincerely,

Manfred H.M. van Dulmen

Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs

The following message was shared with the UMBC community on April 15 to announce the naming of a new vice provost and dean of the Graduate School:

* * * * *

Dear UMBC Community,

I am pleased to announce the appointment of Christa J. Porter as the next vice provost and dean of the Graduate School. Christa joins UMBC on July 1 from Kent State University in Ohio where she serves as the interim dean of the Graduate College and as a faculty member. 

The vice provost and dean of the Graduate School is a key position in serving the university to guide the future of graduate education and graduate student success at UMBC. Christa is a collaborative leader who brings a wealth of experience and a deep commitment to inclusive excellence and student success to the role. She brings substantial administrative experience at the department and university level, working across colleges and divisions in a shared governance environment. 

As we embark on strategic planning, Christa also has significant experience in this space. In addition to her administrative experience, Christa brings a very strong record as a faculty member. Christa is a nationally recognized scholar, teacher, and mentor. Her areas of expertise include the socialization and trajectory of Black women in higher education, student development at the intersections of identities, and research and praxis in higher education and student affairs. In addition to serving as the next vice provost and dean of the Graduate School, Christa will also have a faculty appointment in the Language, Literacy, and Culture doctoral program.

Christa earned a Ph.D. in college student affairs administration and an interdisciplinary qualitative research studies certificate at the University of Georgia, a M.A. in higher education from the University of Maryland, College Park, and a B.A. in social relations and policy from Michigan State University.

I want to give a special thanks to Jeffrey Halverson, who has selflessly served as the interim vice provost and dean of the Graduate School. His thoughtful leadership has been invaluable during this season of transition. I also want to take this opportunity to thank Ana Oskoz for chairing the search committee and everyone who was involved in the search process. I appreciate your continued commitment to graduate education at UMBC. 

Please welcome Christa to the UMBC community as she returns to Maryland. 

Sincerely, 

Manfred H.M. van Dulmen

Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs

Sean Silverman began his UMBC journey as a computer science major. After taking several programming classes in high school, he was ready to pursue a career in data science while also enrolling in history courses to foster his love of history. However, by his second semester, Silverman’s passion for history inspired him to switch majors during his sophomore year. It is a common misperception among incoming students that they must commit to one path, but UMBC is a place where students can explore careers across disciplines and have the support needed to shift gears and equip themselves with the tools to succeed academically. 

Silverman’s initial interest in history was sparked by his older sister’s trips to Kazakhstan and other Central Asian countries and then by the deep dive into that region’s intricate past. At UMBC, he found a mentor in Brian Van Wyck, assistant professor of history, who shared a similar academic trajectory. During the fall semester of his senior year, Silverman completed his 30-page history capstone research paper on the Tokyo War Crimes Trials of 1946 – 1948. As he looks forward to graduation, Silverman reflects on how he rose to meet the challenge of his successful capstone project with the support ofVan Wyck.

Learning the skills as you go

Van Wyck, who has been at UMBC for nearly five years, shares Silverman’s enthusiasm for learning about places, events, and languages vastly different from his own experiences and history. Like Silverman, he did not travel abroad or become fluent in a second language during his undergraduate years. It wasn’t until after college, when Van Wyck worked and lived in Turkey, that he began learning Turkish and German. These skills flourished through the Fulbright U.S. Student Program in the Turkish immigrant community of Detmold, in northwestern Germany, and the support of the Turkish Critical Language Scholarship. Van Wyck’s willingness and curiosity to immerse himself in Detmold’s linguistic, cultural, and political crossroads shaped the trajectory of his research and influenced his teaching, including Silverman’s capstone course.

“I like the complexity and challenge of research, putting different kinds of sources in different languages in conversation with one another to find surprising answers to important questions relevant to understanding problems and injustices in our contemporary world,” says Van Wyck, who promoted opportunities for UMBC, faculty, and students to study and research in Germany as a 2023 – 2024 DAAD Research Ambassador.

(right)While conducting research at the Atatürk Library in Istanbul, Van Wyck consulted a 1966 news article from the Cumhuriyet, the oldest Turkish daily newspaper, about Turkish migrant workers’ attempt to organize religious services in West Germany. (Image courtesy of Van Wyck)

A diverse tool kit for humanities and social science research

Silverman’s capstone class first learned about the post-WWII Nuremberg Trial of 1945 – 1946 and the Tokyo War Crimes Trials of 1946 – 1948, then students chose an aspect of one of the trials for further research. With Silverman’s keen interest in Asian history, the Tokyo War Crimes Trials intrigued him. His passion and dedication helped him find elusive dates, names, references, and footnotes, which led to a domino effect of ideas about the 11 presiding judges representing 11 countries from North America, Europe, and Asia that shaped his thesis, “Presupposed Justice: How Orientalism Affected the Tokyo Trial.” An Orientalism framework analyzes how the West negatively perceives, stereotypes, and exerts power over the East, often through colonialism, racism, and the sexualization of Asian people.

For students with little experience researching international topics, Van Wyck’s expertise in international and multilingual research helped bridge that gap. He has spent over a decade studying migration from Turkey to West Germany, starting in the 1960s. His current research was spurred by a long-forgotten banned Turkish public school textbook, created by Germany, to teach Turkish students their language and culture without input from Turkey.

“There was little information, but I found some copies. I spent a great deal of time reading and coding the information and conducting a quantitative analysis of the topics according to geography, the authors in each section, and those cited,” says Van Wyck who also took advantage of UMBC’s interlibrary loan service to access law books in Dutch from the 1980s, original pamphlets in German from the 1970s, and Turkish-language memoirs written by imams and theology professors. “I used government documents and archives. Then, I tracked down the project’s administrators and authors and conducted in-depth interviews. By using humanities and social science research methods, I was able to tell the story of this unique and broad textbook project that was, in the end, canceled.”  

Silverman faced similar obstacles in his research throughout the semester. “The Tokyo Trials are not covered as well as the Nuremberg Trial and less so through an Orientalism framework,” says Silverman. To help students move beyond the general knowledge of the trials, Van Wyck noted databases and archives that were less familiar to students. He first pointed Silverman to the University of Virginia Law School International Military Tribunal for the Far East Digital Collection. Then, Silverman navigated the databases of the Library of Congress and the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s  War Crimes Documentation Initiative

“Professor Van Wyck suggested a document written in French that related heavily to the Tokyo Trials and Orientalism. He knows some French and helped me translate it.” Silverman also made the most of his budding Japanese skills to further his project. He was in search of the dissent by the only judge who wanted to acquit all the Japanese leaders charged with war crimes. “I couldn’t find much in English. My one semester of Japanese came to the rescue,” says Silverman. “I found the dissent by looking up his last name in Japanese, which ended up being in the title of a book.”

The trail didn’t end there. Silverman struck gold among the 690,000 physical books in the Albin O. Kuhn Library, where he found two books in the political science and international law sections that profoundly shaped his paper. The Tokyo Trial and Beyond: Reflections of a Peacemonger is a collection of interviews with one of the sitting judges and the Sugamo Prison, Tokyo: An Account of the Trial and Sentencing of Japanese War Criminals in 1948, by a U.S. Participant, describes life inside the American-guarded prison. With a wide array of resources, Silverman began to write. 

Writing history

After the research is complete, students begin analyzing the facts. However, this part of the process shifts from a solitary task to a communal experience. Students read each other’s papers, ask questions, and suggest changes several times before Van Wyck gives feedback. Four to five drafts later, students turn in a final product—Silverman received an A. It’s a moment Silverman didn’t foresee when he started at UMBC.

“Switching to a history major two years into my college career, I felt a little behind for a while, especially with my research skills. Wanting to go to graduate school, I knew I needed to work on that and build the skills over the years,” says Silverman. “The extensive research and synthesizing writing skills have been the most valuable skills I’ve gained, not just in this class but from all my history classes at UMBC. They will serve me well as I continue further into my academic career in graduate school and make plans to travel to Asia.”

“I became a historian because the questions that interested me take place predominantly in the past,” says Van Wyck. He will return to Germany this summer as a visiting research fellow at the Leibniz Center for Contemporary History Potsdam and at the International Youth Library. “I think it’s important for historians and undergraduate history majors to gain access to a broad and diverse toolkit.”

In fall 2025, Van Wyck will teach HIST 372: Nazi Germany, HIST 210: Migration in World History, a new course he developed.

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