UMBC’s alumni showed themselves to be true “Retriever Believers” this fiscal year, helping UMBC to exceed its goals for alumni giving for Fiscal Year 2012, the Office of Development reports.

Final numbers for the fiscal year, which ran from July 1, 2011 through June 30, 2012, showed that:

• 2,515 alumni donors contributed during FY12, a 17% increase over FY11
• Alumni donors contributed $316,780, a 5.6% increase over our FY12 goal
• 517 alumni gave for the first time this year; of that group, 63% are graduates of the last ten years
• UMBC had an 84% pledge fulfillment rate (industry standard is 70%)

Annual Fund gifts have an immediate and direct impact on academic and other resources for UMBC students. Because State funds provide less than 25% of the University’s operating budget and tuition and fees alone do not cover the full cost of a UMBC education, these yearly gifts to the University help to keep a UMBC education within reach for our students and families and support the core elements of UMBC’s academic programs.

This year has been very successful for UMBC’s annual giving program,” said Dayna Carpenter, coordinator of Annual Giving. “For the first time in five years, we’ve had an across the board increase in all of our donor numbers including alumni, parents, and faculty and staff.”

UMBC’s Office of Development beefed up Annual Giving operations this year, most notably unveiling a new student Phonathon calling program. Students in the program enjoyed talking with alumni, sharing stories, comparing notes about classes – and even taking away valuable career advice.

“We are truly grateful to all of the donors who made gift to UMBC this year,” said Carpenter.  “They’ve helped to create and sustain scholarships and other important programming that enhances the lives of students at UMBC.”

• Read more stories about how Annual Giving helps students at UMBC.
• Make a gift to UMBC.

In a Baltimore Sun op-ed, Kimberly Moffitt, assistant professor of American studies, criticizes the number of “promotion ceremonies” held for schoolchildren and questions whether “milestones” are being overemphasized.

While acknowledging the appeal for parents of celebrating their children’s accomplishments, Moffitt noted that such ceremonies can involve valuable time and considerable financial resources from our already-strapped school systems, and proposes an alternative awards program more modest in scope for the whole of a school, with divisions in terms of elementary and middle school.

Moffitt wrote that the recently-released Maryland School Assessment (MSA) scores for Baltimore “[confirm] that more instruction time, not less, is needed for all of our children. And limiting the weeks of planning, rehearsing, celebrating and then ‘promoting’ our children might prove to be one area where we can help shift our educational culture to the business of educating, and not prematurely celebrating.”

The piece, “Too many celebrations, not enough education,” appeared in the Baltimore Sun on July 16.

Psychology professor Robert Provine’s latest book Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond  as reviewed in the August 2012 issue of Scientific American.

Anna Kuchment, senior editor for the magazine, wrote in the “Recommended” section that Provine “has written a charming ode to ‘Small Science’—science that does not require a large budget or fancy equipment but that is interesting nonetheless. Taking examples from his own research, some of which involved nothing more complicated than stalking graduate students and observing how and when they laugh, he explains the origins of some of the most prevalent, but often overlooked, human behaviors.”

The Ancient Studies Department is delighted to announce the arrival of Dr. David Rosenbloom as an Associate Professor of Ancient Studies.

Rosenbloom is a specialist in Athenian tragedy and comedy. His research in Greek tragedy resulted in a new edition of the Persians and a co-edited volume, _Greek Drama IV: Texts, Contexts, Performance_, as well as many articles for _Blackwell’s Encyclopedia of Greek Tragedy_. His next books will be the _Blackwell Companion to Euripides_ and __A City of Scoundrels: Culture and Hegemony in Classical Athens, among others.

Most recently, Rosenbloom has been a senior lecturer in the Classics Department at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, where his excellence in teaching was known. His outreach there to Classicists and non-Classicists alike demonstrate his own love of the disciplines that are taught in the Ancient Studies Department. He has also taught at Johns Hopkins and Princeton in the United States.

He and his family are particularly happy to be returning to the Baltimore area. He is excited to be coming to ANCS and UMBC at a time when the Humanities are receiving such great emphasis and to a department where Latin and Greek continue to be highly valued.

Recent UMBC Ph.D. alumnus Sanjit Karmakar ’12, physics, has been featured in a  Baltimore Sun story focusing on his work in “ghost imaging,” the process by which a picture can be taken without actually “seeing” the object which is being photographed.
The camera Karmakar designed, which Sun reporter Jonathan Pitts described as “look[ing] like a cross between an 1890s camera and a bulky steamer trunk,” utilizes the light of the sun as the source for images, which are generated on a computer using mathematics associated with quantum physics. This process can be used to generate images of objects on other continents and planets without the distortion of traditional photography, according to the piece.
Karmakar’s research has made a splash in physics research circles, the article said, and has implications in defense and other areas.
Speaking on the still-unknown aspects of the nature of light, Karmakar was quoted as saying that “[m]any people still don’t understand its true properties.”
Read the full story here.

Recent UMBC Ph.D. alumnus Sanjit Karmakar ’12, physics, has been featured in a  Baltimore Sun story focusing on his work in “ghost imaging,” the process by which a picture can be taken without actually “seeing” the object which is being photographed.

The camera Karmakar designed, which Sun reporter Jonathan Pitts described as “look[ing] like a cross between an 1890s camera and a bulky steamer trunk,” utilizes the light of the sun as the source for images, which are generated on a computer using mathematics associated with quantum physics. This process can be used to generate images of objects on other continents and planets without the distortion of traditional photography, according to the piece.

Karmakar’s research has made a splash in physics research circles, the article said, and has implications in defense and other areas.

Speaking on the still-unknown aspects of the nature of light, Karmakar was quoted as saying that “[m]any people still don’t understand its true properties.”

Read the full story here.

Recent Ph.D. Sanjit Karmakar ’12, physics, was featured in an article published by The Baltimore Sun July 13th.

The focus of the article was on Karmakar’s work in “ghost imaging,” where a picture can be taken without actually “seeing” the object which is being photographed. The camera the physicist designed utilizes the light of the sun as the source for images, which are generated on a computer using mathematics associated with quantum physics. This process can be used to generate images of objects on other continents and planets without the distortion of traditional photography, according to the piece.

Speaking on the still-unknown aspects of the nature of light, Karmakar was quoted as saying that “[m]any people still don’t understand its true properties,” something which the odd-looking camera described as “look[ing] like a cross between an 1890s camera and a bulky steamer trunk” by reporter Jonathan Pitts is hoped by the physicist to address more on for his students, as well as his own work.

Five alumni will perform a chamber music concert at UMBC this month to benefit a Baltimore program that provides music lessons to inner-city youth.

The show, to be held in the UMBC Fine Arts Recital Hall on July 28 at 3:30 p.m., will feature the following alumni musicians as they take on works by Haydn, Schoenfield and Dvořák: music majors Rachele Sills ’07, Erin Terwilliger ’09, Ryan Bridgland ’06, Stefanie Watson ’05, and Winnie Nham ’09, political science.

“Music has played an important role for us throughout our lives, and we believe that every student should be afforded the opportunity to learn an instrument, regardless of socio-economic background,” said Nham.

“To us, this is truly a cause to perform for.”

A portion of ticket proceeds will go to the Bridges Program, which provides high-quality string education to youth in Baltimore City Public School at no cost to students.

Click here for more information about the concert.

On July 13, alumnus George Derek Musgrove ’97, history, and new addition to UMBC’s history faculty, was a guest on the NPR radio show “Tell Me More,” where he spoke with guest host Maria Hinojosa about the history of government investigations into African-American politicians.
Listen to the interview here.
Musgrove is the author of Rumor, Repression, and Racial Politics, and spoke of his investigations into the increasing numbers of legal investigations of black elected officials from the 1960s and 1970s onward, or what he calls “harassment ideology.”
“When I sat down to a study of post-Civil Rights Era black politics when I first entered graduate school, I was interested in figuring out what happened when all the marching stopped, what happened when black folks shifted from protests to politics. And as I was going through a bunch of records, I just kept finding black elected officials claiming that the government and the news media was out to get them, that there was literally a conspiracy to undermine black leadership,” he said.
“And so I wanted to look into it. I wanted to understand if, in fact, this was going on. But more than figure out whether or not there was a conspiracy or there was a pattern, I just wanted to figure out what it meant that black folks believed this, even if it wasn’t true. And so the book is a product of trying to answer those two questions.”
This post originally appeared on UMBC Insights.