Saturday, October 22, over 350 students, faculty members, and guests gathered at UMBC for the 14th Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium in the Chemical and Biological Sciences. Fourteen UMBC students took home awards — five in biochemistry and molecular biology and nine in the biological sciences.

The symposium included more than 200 posters. Forty-five faculty and graduate student volunteers selected 70 posters as first or second place winners in 37 categories. The winning students were presented with framed certificates and will receive gift cards to an online bookstore.

The daylong event has become a major annual symposium on the East Coast for presenting undergraduate research. This year featured poster presentations by students representing 40 institutions from eight states and Washington, D.C.

Michelle Starz-Gaiano, an Assistant Professor of Biology at UMBC, says the event, ”is a great opportunity for students to learn to talk about their research in an understandable way to a broad audience.”

Niambi Brewer, a winner in the symposium agrees. She says that each time you present your work, “you learn different and better ways to get your point across. It’s always a rewarding experience.”

Bill LaCourse, Interim Dean of the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences says, “The event, is designed to promote and recognize undergraduate research across the region by providing a juried, multi-institutional opportunity for students to present their work in a professional manner.”

UMBC President, Freeman Hrabowski gave the opening remarks. Dr. Rachel Brewster, Associate Professor in Biology at UMBC, gave the midday plenary lecture, “Getting the Brain into Shape: Mechanisms of Neural Tube Morphogenesis.”

The Undergraduate Research Symposium in the Chemical and Biological Sciencs is sponsored by UMBC through a grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health. The annual event is planned and organized by faculty and staff in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in UMBC’s College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences.

As a photographer for the Baltimore Sun, A. Aubrey Bodine’s photography captured Maryland life. On Saturday, November 19, the Baltimore Sun will auction of over 7,000 of his prints.

Tom Beck, chief curator at the Albin O. Kuhn Library, was on “Midday with Dan Rodricks” on November 17 to discuss the library’s Bodine collection, which contains over 3,000 Bodine prints.

“He was the person who I think single-handedly invented our cherished traditional Maryland imagery,” said Beck.

The full conversation can be heard here.

Recent polls indicate that America thinks congress is a lost cause.  Is the solution to hand over leadership to a younger generation? Will the momentum of Occupy Wall Street propel young people to greater levels of civic engagement?

Those are the questions that Craig Berger, student life’s coordinator for campus and civic engagement, discussed on WYPR’s “Midday with Dan Rodricks” on Thursday, November 17.

“What I think is interesting about the Occupy Wall Street movement is how it has been institutionalized,” said Berger. “Millennials like institutions, they like to work together, but in this case the institutions are failing them. So they’re creating their own.”

The full conversation can be heard here.

Michelle Scott, associate professor of history, will head to South Africa this winter to work with students on issues of diversity.

Scott is a Resource Faculty in the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow-SSRC Graduate Initiatives Program, which aims to transform the academy by eradicating racial disparities on the faculties at colleges and universities in the United States and South Africa.  She and five other Resource Faculty Fellows have been invited to lead a seminar at the University of Capetown, South Africa, for graduate students. The seminar will deal with diversifying the academy and finishing the dissertation.

Scott has also been asked to speak at a cultural exchange program with students from Wesleyan, Williams, Duke, Oberlin and the Emory Summer Institute for HBCU students. She will be in South Africa from January 3, 2012, to January 14.

Kugel. Challah. Blintz. Lox.

For many students, these words aren’t even part of their vocabulary, much less their diet. They certainly weren’t for the fellows at the Imaging Research Center. But in spring 2010, they left behind campus grub for the world of Jewish food. The results of their endeavor are now featured in “Chosen Food: Cuisine, Culture and American Jewish Identity,” an exhibit at the Jewish Museum of Maryland that runs through next fall.

“I wanted the fellows to work on a project that would have a public impact and show off what they could do technologically, but also really enrich their experience,” said Timothy Nohe, associate professor of visual arts, who worked with the fellows on the project.

The fellows visited kitchens, banquet halls, restaurants and marketplaces, and conducted interviews in the studio. The end result of their work is a series of documentary films and interviews shown throughout the exhibition.

“We’ve been increasing our inclusion of media over the past few years, and the media components of this exhibition are the strongest we’ve had yet,” said Rachel Kassman, assistant curator at the museum. “While we’ve always relied on the stories of actual people, this really brings it home.”

None of the students who worked on the project are Jewish, but their unfamiliarity with the topic was often an advantage because the museum wanted to create an exhibit that was accessible to both Jews and non-Jews.  The students helped to universalize aspects of the Jewish food experience—such as the concept of “yosher,” or ethical consumption—to an audience that might not be familiar with these terms.

Timothy Bubb ’11, animation, and ’13 M.F.A., imaging and digital arts, pointed out that the project didn’t just take them out of their comfort zone culturally, but technologically as well. “Past projects have mostly involved creating artwork on a computer in the safety of my dorm room,” he said. For this project, the students had to physically travel to locations around the state and work with video and sound equipment.

That was part of the point of the project, said Nohe. “Everybody, at some point, took on the role of camera operator, sound operator or director,” he said. “That really allows them to experience what it’s like to be in the real world, because they’ll find that, once they leave UMBC, they’re constantly changing themselves because the market is constantly driving them in new directions.”

Giving students that real-world research experience is an integral part of the IRC Fellows program: cohorts of about 8 students spend two years working on a different project, under a different professor, each semester. That means that while the Jewish museum of Maryland was celebrating the grand opening of the exhibition on October 23, the IRC fellows were already well into developing a game for their next project.

But while the students have moved on, the “Chosen Food” exhibit will run through September 30, 2012. Kassman said that the museum also plans to feature the materials the fellows collected on its website over the coming months, and the exhibition will travel to other locations after it finishes its Baltimore run.

“I think they realize that they have really rich research materials here, as rich as the material culture that’s in the exhibition,” said Nohe.

(11/18/11)

If you’re driving through nighttime Baltimore in the next few weeks, don’t forget to look up. Every day, from sunset to sunrise through mid-December, the iconic 100-year old Bromo Seltzer Tower’s four clock faces will be lit up with animations created by Kelley Bell ’06, MFA, who also teaches at UMBC.

From the Baltimore Sun:

“I love the idea of people interacting with my work,” Bell says.

“One of the things that’s very problematic for me with most animation is that it takes place inside a frame. You sit in a chair and look at it. My art is about finding ways to get out of that box. People can immerse themselves in the artwork, share a physical space with it.”

Read the full story in the Baltimore Sun and watch a video about the project here.

Mario Monti “may be just what Italy needs” to avert economic crisis, writes UMBC associate professor of political science Carolyn Forestiere in a letter to the Baltimore Sun. She notes, “Mr. Monti does not belong to a specific political party and was not directly elected by the public,” which makes his rise to the office of prime minister perplexing for some. However, Forestiere argues, at a time of political disagreement over how to manage necessary reforms, “Prime Minister Monti’s technocratic government may be the best immediate solution to thwart economic crisis in Italy.”

UMBC public policy professor David Salkever delves into the University System of Maryland merger debate in a new Washington Post letter to the editor and Baltimore Sun commentary, published last week.

In the Sun, Salkever argues that merging the University of Maryland, College Park and University of Maryland, Baltimore in an effort to “raise their national rankings based on total research funding” represents flawed logic, given that rankings groups are aware of and have mechanisms to mitigate the effects of such tactics, such as collecting data at the campus rather than institutional level. He writes, “to increase the College Park rankings, in the authoritative ‘Top American Research Universities’ report, we would need to make some (very expensive and disruptive) geographic moves of programs to the College Park campus.”

Responding to the argument that a merger would increase research collaboration across the campuses, Salkever’s Post letter notes: “Before proceeding with an expensive, complicated process to solve [the suggested] collaboration ‘problem,’ officials should first get evidence that a problem exists.” He adds that if the problem does exist, officials should take a careful, evidence-based approach to addressing it.

Thomas Schaller’s new Baltimore Sun commentary responds to Rick Perry’s recent debate gaffe, where he failed to recall the third cabinet agency he’d like to close, after naming the Depts. of Education and Commerce. Beyond the “oops” moment, UMBC political science professor Schaller asks why Perry wants to eliminate those three departments in particular, rather than cutting spending across all departments or eliminating newer agencies.

Schaller has also written a new guest post for Sabato’s Crystal Ball, exploring the limited political impact of President Obama’s foreign policy successes in Iraq, Libya and with the killing of Osama bin Laden. Schaller writes: “His performance thus far has been pretty solid, but he stands to reap little to no electoral benefit from it.”

Three students were awarded the Second Generation Scholarship on November 9 during the W.E.B. DuBois Lecture featuring speaker Carla L. Peterson of the University of Maryland College Park. The annual lecture is sponsored by the department of Africana Studies.

A group of African-American alumni started the Second Generation Scholarship in 1986 as a means to give back to the campus and become more involved in UMBC. The scholarship provides funding to continuing students whose money for college often decreases the longer they stay in college and graduate. Among the requirements, scholarship candidates must be currently enrolled or have taken a course in Africana studies and demonstrate a commitment to improving the lives of minorities through community service, extracurricular activities or other community involvement.

Learn more about the scholarship here.
The 2011-12 scholarship winners: Oseogie Okojie ’14, Nia Hampton ’13, founder James Wiggins Esq. ’75, and Mahelet Gennene ’13.