“The desire to empower citizens directly is alluring in principle but can be very problematic in practice,” writes UMBC political science professor Thomas F. Schaller in his latest Baltimore Sun column.

Schaller is referring to the practice of using ballot referenda to impact policy, rather than working through the legislature. He writes, “Last week, top Maryland Democrats announced their intention to make it more difficult to put statewide policy referenda on the ballot. The move is a clear response to Republicans’ success last year in putting to referendum policy questions in the hope of achieving victories the GOP couldn’t win in the legislature.”

But what, exactly, is the problem with this form of “direct democracy”? Schaller suggests, “Policy fights should be won by persuading the public to elect officials who will fight to pass laws, issue orders and appoint judges who in turn rule in accordance with public preferences. Circumventing the checked-power lawmaking process with referenda, or trying to manipulate the referendum process to embolden or thwart the other party, offends our constitutional traditions.” For these reasons, he argues, Maryland Democrats’ efforts to limit referendum access are right on merits, but wrong on motives.

Lisa Moren, Associate Professor of Visual Arts will be speaking as part of a distinguished speaker lecture series for Hexagram-Concordia, a “center for research-creation in media arts and technology,” affiliated with Concordia University in Montreal.

“Moren will present several projects that intersect technologies, phenomena and compelling narratives.” Her lecture and seminar titled “Phenomena, Ecology and Technology” and “Ecology and Economy: The Outback Stock Exchange” respectively, will discuss her personal art projects and works in progress, and their relation to current ecological issues including the health of the Australian Outback, the Chesapeake Bay and the BP Deep Water Horizon oil spill.

Learn more about the presentations, at Hexagram-Concordia’s website.

Mathematics Professor Manil Suri has been in the news recently, as his latest novel, “The City of Devi,” hits bookstore shelves.

On Wednesday, February 6, the Baltimore City Paper published a review of the book, saying that it “is “streamlined and cinematically purified… by narrowing his focus and heightening the emotional tenor of the city, he manages to give it a mythological quality.”

Suri also spoke with the Baltimore Sun for a February 3 interview entitled “UMBC mathematician Manil Suri publishes his third novel.”  This novel completes a trilogy about hindu dieties that Suri began with his 2001 book, “The Death of Vishnu.”  Speaking of this book, Suri said, “When I first started thinking about the trilogy, I always had an arc in my mind of the past, the present and the future… But my book about the future was an evolution. It took me 12 years to write. Even when I got to the midpoint, I didn’t know if it was going to be about Brahma or about Devi. Every story needs a creator. As the most well-known, Brahma was the most logical face to put there. But when you dig deeper, the true Hindu trinity really is Vishnu, Shiva and Devi, who represent the three different strands of Hinduism. Brahma was a later addition. He came in during the post-Vedic period, when people tried to tie those strands together. Because Devi has nine incarnations, she can be anything: the destroyer, the creator and the symbol of art. But, Brahma’s mythology is such that he doesn’t get activated until you’re at the end of a cycle. If I had been writing a post-apocalyptic novel, he might have been the right person.”

Suri also spoke to NPR’s Weekend Edition, where he talked about how leaving India has affected his writing about the country. “I grew up in like one room of a large apartment, and we were kind of the only Hindu family in an apartment that had three families of Muslims, so you know, that’s why I think the Hindu-Muslim thing keeps coming up in my novels. I don’t think I would have had the space or the quiet to actually concentrate on fiction. I do think that coming here I can sort of see the country much more — much more like a globe, like you would see the moon from the Earth or vice versa. And I think especially with this novel, I can see these relations like, OK, [India is] sitting there next to Pakistan and China, you know, all three of which are armed with nuclear weapons. So that’s one of the advantages,” he said.

Finally, on February 6, Suri spoke with WYPR’s “Maryland Morning” for a segment called “When a Mathematician Turns Novelist.”  Host Tom Hall pointed out that the theme of a trinity appears often throughout the book, and Suri admitted that even he didn’t pick up on the theme until late in his writing process. “I actually gave up this novel, and I started a new novel, and I told my agent ‘This is not going to work.’ I even had a mathematical proof that this novel could not be completed. .. and then when I saw the number three, I realized that these three characters have to somehow come together,” Suri said.

Cambridge, Mass.- UMBC senior guard Brian Neller has been named America East Conference Men’s Basketball Player of the Week for games ending Feb. 3, 2013.

Neller netted a heavily-contested 25-footer with 0.5 seconds to play to propel the Retrievers to a thrilling 68-67 victory over Maine at the RAC Arena on Sat., Feb. 2.

He shook off a difficult first half and hit 3-of-6 from behind the arc in the second half to finish with 12 points. On Wednesday, Neller scored a season-high 18 points, hitting 6-of-13 from behind the arc in the Retrievers’ 61-58 victory at Binghamton on Wed., Jan. 30.

Neller, who moved into fifth place on UMBC’s all-time 3-point field goal list (now 228) with six at Binghamton on Wednesday, has 25 treys in his last six outings. He needs four more treys to move past Skip Saunders (1990-94) and into fourth place. He leads America East in treys per game (now 3.6) in league play and is fifth in 3-point percentage at 39.5.

The books may sit quietly on their shelves, but the rest of The Ivy Bookshop buzzes with the activity of book selling.

In the back of the Baltimore shop on this particular early evening, employees race to load Bill Clinton biographies onto a cart in time to sell at a symposium downtown later that night. And near the reading nook, UMBC professor Robert Provine prepares for a reading and Q&A in the bookshop about his new book on the psychology of hiccups.

At the center of the commotion in his favorite leather reading chair sits Eduard Berlin ’70, political science – cool as a cucumber despite the frenetic activity spinning around him.

Berlin and his wife, Ann, took over The Ivy Bookshop a little more than a year ago from its previous owner, Baltimore arts philanthropist Darielle Linehan. They’ve thought long and hard about what the future of independent bookstores could – and must – become to survive a changing reading landscape, and have already taken big steps to do so: upgrading the bookstore’s web presence, forming selling partnerships with a bevy of big-time area organizations and schools, and organizing events at the shop.

“It’s not just about selling a book anymore,” says Berlin, a member of UMBC’s first graduating class who now has a 30-year career in corporate and financial tech behind him. “People can buy a book anywhere. What we’re doing is making an experience that’s unique for this community.”

Knowing a bit about Berlin’s former career – one in which he repeatedly surfed ahead of the curve, taking chances on web solutions that didn’t exist until he conceived and built them – makes his choice to start a second career at an independent bookstore seem a little less, well, crazy. After graduating from UMBC, Berlin got his law degree and practiced corporate law for the FCC before moving on in the 1980s to help companies including Citibank, Deutsche Bank and Reuters implement global reporting systems when the Internet was still a novelty. Talk about pioneering.

Berlin also credits his alma mater with helping to develop his business sense. “The real pioneers of UMBC were experimenting on so many different levels that I think maybe subliminally I took this concept of being out-of-the-box, being willing to try different things, not needing as much structure,” he said. “My entire career, I was always the first person to do a particular job, or open up new territory, or build new product, or explore things that maybe on the surface at least seemed to be cutting edge. And the fact that I went to a new school like UMBC maybe had a lot to do with that.”

That drive to innovate (and succeed at it) – along with a genuine love of reading – made The Ivy the perfect match for Berlin. It helps, too, that his wife spent a career in publishing.

“We’ve always been a book family,” said Berlin, whose son Sam – the spitting image of his parents – helps direct traffic from behind the front counter.

“I thought it was less crazy than his original plan, which was to have an art gallery,” Sam quips. “This seems slightly less volatile by comparison.”

Keeping the place busy is a key to the plan. On any given night, visitors might stumble upon a reading by an interesting author, or a book club talking animatedly in a corner nook. Berlin’s staff is quick to help browsers, and the owner prides himself on choosing every book that lines these shelves.

“There are things that simply cannot be replaced on a tablet or online,” he says. “People like being with other people. They like to discuss things together. There will always be people who value that.”

Mid-interview, a customer taps Berlin on the shoulder. Has he seen the book she’s looking for? Why yes, he says, pinpointing the spot on the shelf behind him. She smiles and wanders to the counter, book in hand.

He returns to his seat and apologizes for the interruption.

“The customer comes first, of course.”

— Jenny O’Grady

Getting healthy is an American obsession. And Matthew Sherman ’08, interdisciplinary studies, is at the forefront of a growing movement that may help make that arduous task easier and more efficient.

It’s all in the juice. But not just any juice. Cold-pressed juices with exotic names like Vamos Green, Goji Lemonade and Coco Verde.

At JugoFresh, Sherman’s burgeoning Miamiarea business, these juices are created with fresh fruits and vegetables in an extraction process that emphasizes quality and care over speed and pasteurization. The process is time-intensive, but the result is a dizzying array of healthy and flavorful drinks that fly off the shelves at the company’s flagship store in Miami’s South Beach – along with an array of smoothies and raw and vegan foods.

The JugoFresh juices are also the building blocks for comprehensive body cleansing regimens that Sherman has devised for athletes and ordinary folks alike.

“The vision of JugoFresh is really simple,” Sherman observes. “Make healthy eating fun.”

Sherman squeezed into the juice business almost as gradually as he makes his products. He began first as a basketball coach, and then as a trainer working with individual athletes. But exercise alone, he says, wasn’t getting the job done for his clients – especially those who had unhealthy diets.

“It was just way too narrow a way of helping them,” observes Sherman, who eventually dove into holistic health training, got certified, and started concocting juice cleanses for clients. Eventually, his juice cleansing business got much bigger than his personal training business. Clients even clamored for the juice all by itself, and JugoFresh was born.

“It really took off as a business,” says Sherman, who now employs 34 people and is looking to expand JugoFresh with a larger dedicated production facility and at least two new locations in Miami in 2013. JugoFresh has also been a hit with media outlets in South Florida, who have raved not just about Sherman’s product, but the positive energy and popularity that he and his colleagues bring to the task of healthier living.

“It’s 20 minutes until closing time at JugoFresh,” wrote Miami-based website Ocean Drive shortly after the opening, “a gleaming new juice bar just off West Avenue, and the line is nearly out the door.”

Sherman says that the cold pressing process – using only fresh ingredients – is the essential element in his approach to juice. Because the fruits and vegetables are pressed, rather than merely chopped, the process keeps the maximum number of nutrients in the juice.

The JugoFresh founder first encountered cold pressed juice during time he spent at the Holistic Natural Health Institute in Hawaii, where Sherman observed the Gerson cancer treatment (which relies heavily on a fresh juice diet) being administered to patients and concluded that its potential benefits might be more widely applied.

“I saw the difference it made in people’s lives,” Sherman says. “And the difference that it made in mine. That’s why I got into juicing. I thought, ‘Why would people wait until they have cancer to do this for themselves?’”

Sherman says that a foundation for his success as an entrepreneur was laid in the shared qualities of his education at Friends School of Baltimore and at UMBC.

“I graduated with a degree in interdisciplinary studies,” says Sherman. “And something that was preached in that program, and in a lot of my classes at UMBC, and also during my experience before that being part of a Quaker community, was to constantly challenge the status quo, and look at things through multiple lenses.”

Sherman adds that another element of his education at UMBC and at Friends School was “a strong commitment not just to an end goal, but a process.”

So how do you create a drink that’s good for you and tastes good? Know that the cucumber, romaine, pear, kale, chard, ginger, lime and Himalayan sea salt that make up the “Green Montaña” will work together on the taste buds? That same willingness to innovate and challenge oneself from a firm base of knowledge also applies to concocting the flavors of JugoFresh.

“As far as flavors, I get pretty inventive,” Sherman says. “But I have a really strong idea of what things are going to taste like before the product is even put together. I can feel it, taste it, know how it’s going to react… But a lot of our flavor profiles are classic flavor profiles that have never been applied to juice. ”

— Richard Byrne ’86

UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, takes your questions.

Q. With the many tools needed for success as president of a university, what’s that one thing you wish you’d known before you became UMBC’s leader?

— Israel Cross ’04, biological sciences, and Ph.D. ’10, gerontology

A. In the early years, I didn’t know as much about how to work effectively with public officials and the Board of Regents of the University System of Maryland to get support for the university.

In the early 1990s, we were still at a disadvantage when we were talking to the state legislature, partly because we didn’t have a large number of graduates in the state legislature. Now we do. We have several very well-positioned alumni in the legislature – and many more good friends of the university.

At that time, we were respected, but we did not have the benefits of older institutions. It took time to build relationships with people in positions of power – both in the legislature and in the corporate community. We were so young. We did not have large numbers of graduates who were CEOs. I didn’t realize when I started how important it was to have those relationships as a new president. For older institutions, when a new president comes in, those powerful people can open doors quickly. I had not thought through what challenges our situation would present. I knew that [former UMBC President Michael Hooker] had started building those relationships. And I knew what could be done to build those relationships. But we had a long way to go.

It simply took time for people to understand that UMBC’s success didn’t start in the late 1980s. Since the university’s founding in the 1960s, the institution has been transforming lives – and there were very many successful alumni from that era who were beginning to build their careers. We simply didn’t have a powerful enough mechanism to shed light on that initial success.

And bad news travels fast. The easiest thing to do is spread bad news. It’s like fire. In those early days, you were more likely to hear about someone who started at UMBC and then things didn’t go well than hear about someone who had excelled. Or you would hear about someone who started here and then transferred. It takes real initiative to spread good news. So getting over all the old stories, such as people thinking that UMBC was going to be an industrial park, was important.

The best part of my job in those early years was coming to appreciate the strength of UMBC’s academic program and the high quality of the faculty and staff that had come here to build the institution in the first 20 years. The early challenge for me was helping colleagues find ways to highlight that strength in different settings and have people believe that it was truly real and not just hype. That takes time. Reputations are not built in a few years. It takes a long time – either to go up or to go down. I had become president of a university that already had impressive substance. We simply needed to highlight that substance and build on it by attracting more resources.

You know, there is a level of greatness we’ve achieved at UMBC that people rarely appreciate, and it has to do with the spirit of this community. It’s a spirit in students, faculty, staff and alumni that focuses on serving. And we see it in so many different ways. The way people celebrate each others’ successes and don’t worry about getting credit. The idea of service, not only to our students, and to our colleagues, but service to the larger community. People at UMBC may have different points of view and disagree, but there is a belief in the importance of the common good. A belief in the importance of what makes us a great university and a great community.

To send a question to President Hrabowski, click here.

UMBC boasts an amazing faculty, and one of the great pleasures of editing this magazine is getting to know many of them and bring the work they do to a much wider audience of alumni and other university stakeholders.

In the Winter 2013 issue of UMBC Magazine, the rich diversity of our faculty’s activities in the arts, social sciences, humanities, mathematics and sciences is on full display.

In our “Discovery” section, you can read how UMBC faculty members are working to attract students to the field of psychology, make our lawns cleaner and greener, create new opportunities for composers to publish their work, and examine the dust particles that surround us and affect our weather and our health.

Two of our main features in this issue provide an even deeper look into how the work of UMBC faculty members is enriching not only the university community, but the larger world as well.

Professor of mathematics Manil Suri is a contemporary Renaissance man: pursuing research in his discipline and also gaining critical acclaim (not to mention excellent sales) for his novels about modern India. (A new novel by Suri, The City of Devi, is being published later this spring.) So how exactly does Suri pull off this double act? Mark Athitakis dove into the head of Manil Suri and found a restless intellect that’s not only focused on formulas and fiction, but also pursuing classroom collaborations that bridge the sometimes fearsome conceptual gaps between math and the humanities.

“‘I feel like I’ve got a platform in some sense,” Suri tells Athitakis about the common ground he had found between his dual passions. “Afforded by whatever success I’ve had as an author—people might say, ‘I’ve read a book by him, let me try this.’” Read more…

If Suri is exploring the connections between mathematics and fiction, UMBC professor of history Kate Brown is boldly exploring the historical no man’s land of the Cold War conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union – and finding more common ground than anyone might imagine.

David Glenn talks to the award-winning historian about her latest book, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford University Press). It is a tale of two cities: the Soviet nuclear city of Ozersk, and Richland, a city in Washington state that abuts the first major U.S. plutonium facility at Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

One of Brown’s strengths as a historian is a willingness to not only delve into archives, but to get as close as she possibly can to the sites of the history about which she writes. She takes a journalist’s delight in interviewing witnesses and blending in with the landscape she’s describing. Conveying a sense of place in history is essential to combine political, social, and scientific history in powerful ways, she tells Glenn. Read more…

“You can do all of that when you start from a place,” Brown says. “By circumscribing the territory you’re looking at, you can transcend these boundaries that we’ve created in these subfields of history.”

— Richard Byrne ’86

Studying a language not only expands your mind, but it expands your circle of friends to far-flung lands and even closer to home, as alumna Randianne Leyshon ’09, modern languages and linguistics, and two other friends discovered as they studied Russian at UMBC.

Fate plays a fundamental role in Russian literature. Unexpected tragedies, reversals of fortune, missed connections. Somewhere Annushka’s always buying and spilling the sunflower oil – an unremarkable event which leads to a horrible death and sets off the fantastical plot of Mikhail Bulgakov’s magical realist masterpiece The Master and Margarita.

It was fate – in the form of an enforced switch of itinerary – that led me to study Russian in the first place. At the age of 14, I had volunteered to go to Nepal as a member of an international mission team. But the trip was canceled and I was rerouted to Russia instead. It was a plot twist in my own life that led me to spend five teenage summers volunteering at camps for underprivileged children and rehabilitation centers near St. Petersburg.

Those experiences (and the chance for more required travel as part of my undergraduate education) led me to apply to become part of UMBC’s Humanities Scholars Program – another auspicious decision that joined my path to the paths of two other ladies and fellow Russian students who’ve become a big part of my life: Sara Osman ’09, linguistics, and M.A. ’11, modern languages and linguistics and Christy Brandly.

Starting with Russian 102, all three of us shared the same language classes, and each of us had strengths and weaknesses in language acquisition that formed a useful balance between us. I was loudmouthed and reckless, not hesitating to speak Russian despite making mistakes. Sara was methodical in memorizing the many rules and cases that structure Russian grammar. And Christy immersed herself in the country’s pop culture, regaling us with contemporary words and phrases not found in our textbooks. We used to joke that none of us could speak Russian without the other two girls around for support.

After two years studying together, we applied for a fall semester abroad in St. Petersburg as a trio and were accepted. (I’m almost positive that Elaine Rusinko, our Russian professor and advisor, advised the program to take the three of us together if they knew what was good for them in her recommendation letters.)

Capricious fate struck, however, shortly after we arrived in St. Petersburg together for a weekend introduction camp – before we’d even met our host families – when we received the terrible news that Christy’s younger brother had unexpectedly passed away. Not only did Christy need to go home, but we discovered quickly that the bureaucracy of Russia’s visa regime would prevent her from returning to finish out our four months in St. Petersburg.

One of the last nights of Christy’s stay in Russia coincided with our first night in St. Petersburg. In a frantic and almost comical quest, we tried to see the cultural capital of bridged canals and spiraling church domes, mystical literature and topsy-turvy history, in a single damp night. The pictures we took are tinged with soft golden streetlights and with spotlights on churches and monuments.

After a somber goodbye to Christy, Sara and I discovered that our host families were only blocks away from each other. Fate had given us a small boon. We spent the semester enjoying a city that we had dreamed and read about together, but when we posted pictures on Facebook of us together, we tagged Christy in them as well.

Fast-forward two years to our graduation week. Sara and I lived together in a multilingual suite in Harbor Hall. Christy had transferred to St. Mary’s College of Maryland after her brother’s death, but she still traveled up to UMBC almost every weekend. Sometime during the last week of classes the three of us wandered around campus, visiting professors and reminiscing. That day, the three of us made a pact that in three years we would find our way back to Russia or the former Soviet Union. (Sara was engaged to another UMBC student who was Kazakh, so we decided that Kazakhstan had to count.)

Over that next three years, we missed our days at UMBC but were on track to accomplish our goals: Sara and I both finished graduate school; she stayed at UMBC and I graduated from the University of Oregon. Christy was writing her thesis at the University of Chicago. Yet we didn’t forget our promise – and finally we had the opportunity to make it happen. Sara received a staff position teaching English at a prestigious university in Kazakhstan; Christy won a Boren Fellowship to research her thesis for a year in Vladivostok; and I received a Fulbright Fellowship to teach English in one of Russia’s ethnic republics.

To top it all off, a special event brought us all together again before we scattered to the far reaches of the Russian-speaking world. Sara married Karim Yergaliyev ’09, business technology administration, and the three of us were reunited at the ceremony to celebrate both the wedding and our own vow to return together.

Our return to Russia and Kazakhstan as a trio has been even more of education. I discovered that I am not cut out to be a teacher, but my passion for writing about Russia has led to writing essays and stories about the country and its culture. Sara’s using her love of grammar to teach English and to take a stab at learning Kazakh. And Christy finally had a chance to immerse herself in a growing circle of Russian friends, staying current with Russia’s pop culture and humor.

Fate saw fit to intervene a final time when Christy and I were able to synchronize our journeys home with a joint visit to St. Petersburg. On a typical shady summer day in June, we reunited on the palace square outside of the Hermitage – residence of tsars and a stage for the Russian revolution – and re-explored the canals and bridges and monuments we had so briefly experienced together five years before.

This reunion completed our abruptly shortened shared study abroad together and gave me the closure I needed to be able to leave Russia without knowing when I will return. We three girls haven’t made any recent promises to each other, but none of us doubt that with a good dose of fate and some hard work, we’ll end up back in Russia together in the near future.

TEACHING THE FUTURE

October 6 was a special night at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront, when 900 guests filled the main ballroom for “A Celebration of Leadership + Innovation” that honored UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, on his 20 years as the university’s leader and inaugurated the Hrabowski Fund for Innovation to sustain and extend advances in teaching.

The celebratory buzz hadn’t yet died down when Provost Philip Rous and a committee selected to administer the fund were already at work identifying the next wave of academic innovators at UMBC. In January, the committee announced the Hrabowski Fund’s first awards.

Two large awards were made to teams led by Marie desJardins, a professor of computer science and electrical engineering (who proposed a new center to assist a redesign of UMBC’s computing curriculum) and Nagaraj K. Neerchal, chair of the mathematics and statistics department (who proposed a new “mathematics gym” to improve students’ foundational math skills.)

Four other proposals received smaller awards. Two teams, one led by Susanne Sutton, a lecturer in the modern languages and linguistics department, and another led by Anne Spence, an assistant professor in the department of mechanical engineering, received funds to develop a new experiential and service learning course requirements. A team led by Craig Saper, director of UMBC’s language, literacy and culture (LLC) program, will create an institute to expand the role for emeritus professors at UMBC. And a proposal by Bruce J. Walz, chair of the emergency health services department, will allow for new video cameras to assist in debriefing of EHS students after team exercises.

Watch video tributes from Dr. Hrabowski’s 20th anniversary celebration and the launch of the Hrabowski Fund for Innovation. Read more…

— Richard Byrne ’86

INCREASING OPPORTUNITY

Cybersecurity is one of the fastest growing fields in American defense and industry, but U.S. universities aren’t keeping up with the voracious demand for trained and certified personnel.

Helping satisfy that demand is the aim of a new collaboration between UMBC’s new Center for Cybersecurity and the Northrop Grumman Foundation: the UMBC Cyber Scholars program. The foundation has provided a $1 million grant to launch the program, which will be run in partnership with the UMBC Center for Women in Technology.

The Cyber Scholars program will recruit 15 to 20 new scholars annually, with special emphasis on increasing the number of women and underrepresented minorities who are being prepared for cybersecurity careers.

Anupam Joshi, director of the Center for Cybersecurity and the Cyber Scholars program, observes that “cybersecurity is of critical national importance, since computer systems are part of the nation’s critical infrastructure. But students often don’t understand the field and women are particularly likely to see it as a bad fit for them. The scholars program gives us a chance to change that perception and show how rewarding and socially important this work can be.”

The Cyber Scholars program continues already fruitful partnerships between UMBC, Northrop Grumman, and the company’s foundation, including the Cync program – a start-up business incubator dedicated to cultivating companies that develop innovative solutions to counter global cyberthreats.

“Northrop Grumman is proud to support education programs that will develop tomorrow’s cyber leaders,” says Wes Bush, chairman, chief executive officer and president of Northrop Grumman.

— Nicole Ruediger

INTERNATIONAL ACCLAIM

Local and national media took notice of UMBC again in September, when the university was lauded once again – for the fourth year running – as the top “Up-and-Coming” school in the U.S. News and World Report’s annual Best Colleges guide. (In 2012, UMBC shared top honors with George Mason University.)

The Best Colleges guide also ranked UMBC eighth on a list of the top national universities “where the faculty has an unusual commitment to undergraduate teaching” – a ranking that the university shared with Duke University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and the University of Notre Dame. But you might have missed some significant recognition that the university gained from another prestigious journal in higher education: Times Higher Education.

In May, the London-based newspaper created its first ranking of universities worldwide that were 50 years old or less. UMBC was ranked at number 63 on that list, joining other U.S. universities including the Universities of California at Irvine (4) and Santa Cruz (7), the University of Illinois at Chicago (11), the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (21), the Universities of Texas at Dallas (29) and San Antonio (53) and George Mason (57).

In an introduction to the table, Times Higher Education writer John Morgan observed that the goal of the “100 Under 50 University Rankings” was “to show which nations are challenging the U.S. and U.K. as higher education powerhouses – and offers insights into which institutions may be future world leaders.”

— Richard Byrne ’86

BUILDING BRIDGES

UMBC has been in the forefront of increasing student access and success in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). And now, with a new $2.6 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the university will make pathways to these STEM fields even wider.

The three-year grant will be used to build a national model to ensure more transfer students earn degrees in these key disciplines. Anne Arundel Community College, the Community College of Baltimore County, Howard Community College and Montgomery College will work with UMBC on this “STEM Transfer Student Success Initiative.”

Almost half of American undergraduates now start their postsecondary education at a community college, and in Maryland alone, about 12,000 students transfer to four-year colleges each year. At UMBC, transfer students now account for 38 percent of new students in STEM fields each year.

“We recognize that universities and community colleges must work more closely together if we are to help more students from all backgrounds succeed in the STEM fields,” says Philip Rous, the grant’s principal investigator and UMBC’s Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs.

“Today, and increasingly in the future, the brightest career prospects will be for those with STEM degrees,” says Daniel Greenstein, director of Postsecondary Success at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “We are pleased to support this project because it will create a pathway for transfer students – many of whom are nontraditional students – to enter these professions.”

— Elyse Ashburn