William R. Soltesz ’72, financial economics and mathematics, one of UMBC’s early Student Government Association presidents, passed away on September 13 at his home in New Jersey. He was 62 years old.

Soltesz, who grew up in Catonsville, served as president of the SGA from 1970 to 1971, and “was pivotal in working with faculty and students to keep the university open during a time when many other fledgling universities closed due to student riots and political pressures related to the Vietnam War,” his obituary reports.

Read an essay about these times at UMBC by Soltesz’s classmate, former Retriever Weekly editor Manus O’Donnell ’72, English, here.

Soltesz later received his M.B.A. from Loyola University in Baltimore, and served as vice president or chief financial officer for several Fortune 500 companies, including Alexander and Alexander and Sara Lee’s Shasta Beverages Division in Baltimore. At the time of his passing, Bill had served as the C.F.O. of Budd Van Lines in Somerset, NJ for over 20 years. He served on the Chester Borough (N.J.) Zoning Board and enjoyed swimming, the study of foreign culture and history through extensive world travel, and studying the American Revolutionary and Civil Wars.

Soltesz’s daughter, Tracy Soltesz ’01, political science, recalls that her father was especially touched by the teaching of Dr. John M.Titchener, emeritus professor of philosophy, who worked with Soltesz closely on various SGA initiatives throughout his tenure. Soltesz is also survived by a son, two brothers, and two grandchildren.

Interment will be this Friday, November 9, at 2:30 p.m. at the Lake View Memorial Park, 2724 Liberty Road, Sykesville, MD, 21784. A memorial reception will be held afterwards from 4 to 6 p.m. at The Rumor Mill Fusion Bar & Restaurant at 8069 Tiber Alley, Ellicott City, MD, 21043. Alumni and friends are welcome to attend and share stories. For questions, please email kesrya@gmail.com.

If you’re on campus regularly, it’s easy to see the excitement building this semester about both the 20th anniversary of Dr. Freeman Hrabowski’s presidency here and the launch of the Hrabowski Fund for Innovation, a fund created by Dr. Hrabowski to promote new thinking in the classroom.

We’re equally excited to share this video (below), featuring Vice President of Institutional Advancement Greg Simmons, a 2004 graduate of UMBC’s master’s of public policy program, as he talks about the fund, Dr. Hrabowski’s legacy, and how we can all help keep UMBC strong. Enjoy!

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNSn7tQR1GQ]

Support the Hrabowski Fund for Innovation by clicking here.

UMBC’s Earle Ellis, geography and environmental systems, spoke with BBC journalist Andrew Luck-Baker for a recent two-part article examining modern society’s potential contributions to the future fossil record.

In “Leaving our mark: Fossils of the future,” Luck-Baker wrote of one particular aspect of our culture which will likely remain for future scientists millions of years from now: the bones of small and medium-sized animals. Ellis told the reporter that an important aspect of this possibility is the way in which humans discard the bones of these domesticated creatures, whether they’re our pets or our meals.

For more on humanity’s potential legacy, click on  the link above, as well as the first-part exploring the possible record of our cities here.

The work of Visual Arts faculty members Kelley Bell, Lynn Cazabon and Vin Grabill, and Imaging and Digital Arts alumna Jill Fannon has been selected to be featured in LUX, the 2012 Maryland Art Place’s annual fall benefit gala and juried invitational exhibition, highlighting Maryland state artists working specifically in photography and digital media. Lynn Cazabon, Jill Fannon and Vin Grabill will exhibit photography, Kelley Bell will present digital media.

The LUX exhibition opens as part of the Maryland Art Place’s annual fall gala on November 9 and will be on view until December 15. On the night of the gala, all of the artwork in the LUX exhibition will be available for purchase in silent auction format starting at 7pm at Maryland Art Place, Power Plant Live!. There will be a closing reception — free and open to the public — on Thursday, December 13 from 6-8pm. Find more information here.

Donald F. Norris, professor and chairman of UMBC’s Department of Public Policy, has offered insight on topics from Maryland ballot measures to the advertising wars throughout the election season.

He recently commented in a Patch article on early voting, stating: “There is little or no evidence that early voting matters in overall turnout or in overall turnout among sub groups of voters—elderly, young, minorities, etc. So I am not inclined to say anything about this except that turnout is up.”

Why the increase in turnout of early voters? Norris told WBAL, “We’ve got at least three ballot questions that are very emotional in nature.” Norris will provide election commentary tomorrow night on WBAL.

Update (11/8/2012): Norris appeared on WJZ, where he commented that voter turnout will likely not be as high as the last presidential election, but, “that prediction could be upset…by the fact that we’ve got ballot questions that people are very, very invested in.” He also provided election night commentary for WBAL as the returns came in and commented on the election results in the Daily Record (on Governor O’Malley’s plans and on the gambling referendum).

UMBC faculty and staff give their all to the university each and every day simply by doing their jobs well. The launch of this year’s Faculty/Staff Campaign is another important way of showing that you care — and supporting the UMBC community beyond your individual reach.

Even modest gifts add up to help students, faculty and staff succeed. We do great things at UMBC, and every little bit helps us continue to make a difference. Furthermore, our gifts are put to good use; when you make a gift to UMBC, 100% of that gift goes directly to the area that you’ve chosen.

Here are a few stand-out points about the Faculty/Staff Campaign:

• Last year, 216 members of UMBC’s faculty and staff donated over $136,000 to the university.
• Faculty and staff supported a wide range of initiatives – ranging from the University’s Greatest Need to athletics, student affairs and departmental related funds.
• Our faculty and staff donors contribute to UMBC in a number of ways – through gifts-in-kind, planned giving, payroll deduction, and outright gifts.
• Faculty and staff support of the university is a great indicator of how much the UMBC community believes in the mission and vision of the university.
• So far in FY13, there have been 116 contributions from faculty and staff members for $17,129.68.

One great way to make your gift is by signing up for payroll deduction before Friday, November 16. If you would like to make your gift by payroll deduction, please use the form that was sent to you via interoffice mail. If you have questions or need a new form, please contact Dayna Carpenter, Annual Giving Coordinator, at dayna@umbc.edu or ext. 5-3377.

If you prefer to make your gift by credit card, you can do so quickly and easily online at www.umbc.edu/giving. Remember that gifts received before December 31, 2012, can be counted as a charitable contribution for the 2012 tax year; however, please note that gifts made by payroll deduction will fall into the 2013 tax year.

A Computational Biologist and Dartmouth professor, Alumnus Gevorg Grigoryan says his undergraduate research at UMBC was crucial to his success.

Kids typically see college as a chance to get away from their parents. That wasn’t the case with alumnus Gevorg Grigoryan ’02, Computer Science and Biochemistry, who did research with his dad in UMBC’s Computational Photonics Lab as an undergraduate. In 2000, the pair co-authored a paper proposing a new visualization technique for wave transmissions that uses color to represent amplitude and phase information.

Now an assistant professor of Computer Science and an adjunct assistant professor of Biology at Dartmouth College, Grigoryan stresses the importance of doing research early on. As an undergraduate, he worked in not one, but three, different research labs at UMBC: the Computational Photonics Lab, the VANGOGH Lab, and Dr. Daniel Fabris’ Mass Spectrometry lab.

“It was very easy for an undergrad to get involved in research [at UMBC],” says Grigoryan. “It’s not like that everywhere.”

Working in labs gave Grigoryan essential experience that shaped his career path. When it was time to pick a major, he knew that he wanted to do research like his dad, Vladimir Grigoryan, a Physicist who was working as a Research Scientist at UMBC at the time.

Grigoryan switched from Physics to an ambitious double major in Computer Science and Biochemistry when a professor told him about the emerging, interdisciplinary field of Computational Biology. Combining the principles of biology with computing techniques, the new field dealt with simulating and studying biological systems on the computer.

After graduating from UMBC in 2002, Grigoryan went to MIT for his Ph.D. in Computational Biology under Dr. Amy E. Keating. Later he completed his Post Doc at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School under William DeGrado. His research has focused on examining proteins in order to 1) understand their structure, and to 2) use that understanding to design new proteins that can do things like cure disease.

The analysis and design of proteins is what’s being done in Grigoryan’s research lab at Dartmouth. Specifically, Grigoryan and his students are looking at how protein structure dictates protein-protein recognition and the structural mechanisms of information transformation by allostery. In an interesting twist, Grigoryan now has undergraduate research assistants of his own.

As for collaborations with his dad, Grigoryan says that these days, formal collaborations are hard because of distance; Grigoryan works on molding minds in New Hampshire while his dad works at Ciena Corporation in Maryland. Nevertheless, that doesn’t stop them from having heated scientific discussions over the phone, he says.

This story first appeared on UMBC’s Computer Science and Electrical Engineering department website.

U.S. voters frustrated by competing claims of who will win the upcoming presidential election and why can turn to political science professor Thomas F. Schaller’s latest Salon column—“Why Obama/Romney will win/lose”—for insight on election theories.

Schaller’s top theories for why Obama will win include: (1) He’s got a huge field advantage in the swing states. (2) No matter what Romney does, it all comes down to one state, Ohio—and Obama has it locked. (3) The Latino vote is being undercounted. (4) Cell phone users are being undercounted. (5) The 2012 electorate will look similar to 2008. (6) Nate Silver is a genius, and he pegs Obama as a 3-to-1 favorite.

Major theories for why Romney will win include: (1) He’s locked down the independents. (2) Actually he, not Obama, has the turnout advantage. (3) And that’s because Obama’s ground game “edge” is mythical—and besides, a secret Mormon army is quietly mobilizing out West. (4) The youth vote won’t be there for Obama this time. (5) The liberally-biased polls are skewed. (6) Nate Silver’s all wrong.

See also Schaller’s latest Baltimore Sun column, “The virtues of a president with humble origins,” which argues, “The president’s humble beginnings will allow him to continue working on behalf of working-class Americans.”

According to the Daily Record, the Maryland Democratic Party is accusing MDPetitions.com (used to help petition three state laws to referendum over the last year) of violating campaign finance laws. Website founder Del. Neil C. Parrott has responded by saying, “Here we have the Maryland Democrat party trying to use scare tactics” to prevent voters from striking down the referenda.

Donald F. Norris, professor and chairman of UMBC’s Department of Public Policy, comments that with so many hotly debated issues on the ballot this year, Maryland is getting a taste of types of accusations that more politically-diverse states experience regularly during the election season. Norris notes that using online tools such as MDPetitions.com to put issues on the ballot is a major way that Maryland conservatives are trying to increase their reach; he predicts that in the next General Assembly session laws will likely be adopted to “restrict the ability to petition legislation to the ballot.”

Norris also discussed early voting and the same-sex marriage referendum in the Gazette.

Robert Deluty, associate dean of the Graduate School, has published 23 poems in the October 2012 issue of The Faculty Voice.