Asking Erin Hogan to choose her favorite film is like asking her whether she prefers to study Iberian or Latin American films—both of which she researches and fell in love with as an undergrad. The real answer is that Hogan’s favorite film is whatever film she is studying at the time. For her new book, Patriarchy’s Remains: An Autopsy of Iberian Cinematic Dark Humour (2024), she capped the list at 14 films between 1958 and 2018, whose characters must deal with the death of the male head of household. Hogan uses the visions of 14 diverse directors to study cinematic dark humor through a feminist, biopolitical, and socio-economic inequality lens.

“My work is pretty transversal, not exclusive to writing books about one director, one creator, one film, or one novel. I enjoy analyzing multiple sources and finding the patterns across texts. In this case, I focus on films with dark humor,” said Hogan, a professor of Spanish. Dark humor blends humor with grim topics like death, violence, crime, and social dysfunction through wit, irony, or satire. 

“I’ve always been interested in dark humor. When I explain to my students why I study a wide range of texts, films, and languages—Spanish, Italian, Catalan, Portuguese, and most recently, Galego, the language of Galicia in Northwestern Spain—it always comes back to the joy of learning. I encourage students to ask themselves what they want to explore, learn, or know more about, and then to pursue it.”

Spain’s cinema 50 years later

The question Hogan pursues in Patriarchy’s Remains is how and why the legacy of Francisco Franco, Spain’s fascist, repressive, and violent dictator who ruled Spain from 1939 until his death in 1975, continues to impact Spain’s work toward democracy—even 50 years after his death on November 20, 1975. 

“Patriarchy’s Remains has two meanings. One refers to the on-screen corpse of the patriarch and the other to the persistence of patriarchy in Spain today,” writes Hogan in her book. She draws parallels between the families in the films—who must figure out how to live after the patriarch they depended on dies or is killed—and Spain’s citizens, who are still working to understand what a functioning democracy looks like.

“In critiquing Spanish politics, I aim to highlight how Spanish democracy could better serve its people by heeding the protests of its own citizens, on and off screen,” writes Hogan. “Patriarchy’s Remains reveals persisting inequities in post-Franco Spain to shine a light on the disenfranchised children of democracy who grieve for the unfulfilled promises of greater civil liberties and improved quality of life.”

Interested in learning more about Iberian or Latin American film? Hogan is the co-founder and co-curator of CineMaestro an open-access collaborative digital project designed to promote audiovisual literacy and intercultural competencies through the study and teaching of the cinemas by Spanish, Latin American, and Latinx directors.

UMBC’s annual collaborative art exhibition with Towson University, Spark, opened its doors this November at The Peale, Baltimore’s neighborhood museum, and has continued to delight audiences with its captivating installations. This year’s show, titled SPARK VII: Industrial Afterglow, gathers more than 20 artists working across sculpture, installation, sound, photography, video, textiles, and ecological documentation to explore what lingers in the wake of industrial and technological systems.

In addition to those highlighted in photos, participating artists from UMBC include Chelsey Barrera, B.F.A.’27, visual arts; McCoy Chance, M.F.A. ’25, intermedia and digital arts; Danielle d’Amico, M.F.A. ’19, intermedia and digital arts; Gracie Horne, B.F.A.’27, visual arts; Leah Clare Michaels, M.F.A. ’19, intermedia and digital arts; Edgar Reyes, assistant professor of visual arts; Sarah G. Sharp, associate professor of visual arts; Samantha Sethi, adjunct professor of visual arts; and Mariia Usova, M.F.A. ’25, intermedia and digital arts.

“From bioplastic light sculptures and cyanotype archives to rewilded cityscapes and AI-coded sea monsters, the exhibition casts light — literal and symbolic — on the residues of industry, the reconfigurations of ecosystems, and the speculative futures already blooming in the present,” says Liz Faust, who curated the exhibition on behalf of both universities.

”As a former industrial port city undergoing rapid urban transformation, Baltimore provides a vital lens through which to consider the aftermath of extractive systems and the possibilities of repair,” notes Faust. “Spark asks: What remains after infrastructures collapse? How do ecologies adapt and resist? What does it mean to imagine otherwise? By attending to what still glows, hums, or grows through the ruins, this exhibition transforms light from metaphor into method — revealing the unseen, mourning the obsolete, and illuminating paths toward speculative futures.”

Spark continues on display through this weekend, December 7, with free admission. On Saturday, December 6, at 11 a.m., the exhibition will host a panel discussion featuring assistant professor of visual arts Erik Millikin and Alexi Scheiber, M.F.A. ’25, intermedia and digital arts.

Top image: artwork by McCoy Chance.
Photography by Brad Ziegler/UMBC.

For tech-savvy individuals like Eric Stokan, artificial intelligence, programming languages, and open-source software are powerful tools that can turn once-impossible ideas into reality. Researchers can use human language processing to analyze historical documents or legal texts. Through collaborative platforms, global organizations can collaborate quickly without incurring travel costs. In the social sciences, open-source tools provide students with unique opportunities to work with experts developing projects that address community needs. However, to take full advantage of these revolutionary technologies, these tools often require advanced computing skills or access to expensive software, which can limit their impact and exclude those without the necessary resources or training.

Stokan, director of the Center for Social Science Scholarship (CS3), is committed to removing these barriers for faculty and students in computational social science, which uses computers, data, and algorithms to study human behavior and social systems. His research lies at the intersection of urban policy, economic development, and computational social science, with a focus on how local governments make policy decisions and how those decisions impact equity, economic growth, and environmental sustainability. 

The University System of Maryland (USM) William E. Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation has awarded Stokan the Elkins Professorship for Academic Transformation to address this gap with his project “Computational Social Science and Generative AI: Scalable, Modular Training for Teaching, Research, and Public Impact.”

The Elkins Professorship is named after Wilson H. Elkins, a former Rhodes Scholar and president of the University of Maryland, College Park from 1954 to 1978. This prestigious award is for faculty within USM who are working on innovative projects focused on the use of generative AI to advance academic transformation, foster improvements in access, affordability, quality of outcomes, and/or stewardship of people’s time, money, and other scarce resources.

“The professorship will allow me, through the Center for Social Science Scholarship, to first assist faculty and students in understanding how to leverage advances in computing and AI to address new research questions and scale their research in ways that were unfathomable during Dr. Elkins tenure,” says Stokan, associate professor of political science, who earned one of three $10,000 awards. He will use the funding to complete Computational Public Administration—his first book written with R, a free programming language used for statistical computing and graphics—about computational social science methods focused on addressing public policy and administration topics, such as climate change and economic development. 

The funding will also support the design and implementation of five hands-on training modules and workshops tailored for faculty, students, and community organizations. Participants will learn to use generative AI large language models (LLM) like ChatGPT and R. The goal is to help participants answer novel and important research questions, develop marketable technical skills, to work more effectively with data, and better communicate the results of their analyses with the broader community.

“I am deeply honored to receive the Elkins Professorship, in honor of the late Wilson H. Elkins, who was a transformational leader, administrator, and educator,” says Stokan. “This award is important to me because it not only provides support but also affirms my commitment to accommodating learners at all levels of experience in computational social sciences, promoting accessibility, equity, and methodological transparency.”

Initial support for the project came from the UMBC’s Faculty Development Center, the AOK Library’s Digital Scholarship Services, iHARP/Data Science Scholars, and the Institute for Public Leadership at the University of Maryland, College Park.

The workshops will be offered through CS3 in collaboration with CGC-SCIPE, the UMBC Division of Information Technology, and ScaleS. A lecture series component, which will include external speakers, is being co-sponsored with the Department of English, the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Public Health, and the Department of Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communications. 

Register for the fall semester’s workshop series on AI, LLMs, and computational methods.

For tech-savvy individuals like Eric Stokan, artificial intelligence, programming languages, and open-source software are powerful tools that can turn once-impossible ideas into reality. Researchers can use human language processing to analyze historical documents or legal texts. Through collaborative platforms, global organizations can collaborate quickly without incurring travel costs. In the social sciences, open-source tools provide students with unique opportunities to work with experts developing projects that address community needs. However, to take full advantage of these revolutionary technologies, these tools often require advanced computing skills or access to expensive software, which can limit their impact and exclude those without the necessary resources or training.

Stokan, director of the Center for Social Science Scholarship (CS3), is committed to removing these barriers for faculty and students in computational social science, which uses computers, data, and algorithms to study human behavior and social systems. His research lies at the intersection of urban policy, economic development, and computational social science, with a focus on how local governments make policy decisions and how those decisions impact equity, economic growth, and environmental sustainability. 

The University System of Maryland (USM) William E. Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation has awarded Stokan the Elkins Professorship for Academic Transformation to address this gap with his project “Computational Social Science and Generative AI: Scalable, Modular Training for Teaching, Research, and Public Impact.”

The Elkins Professorship is named after Wilson H. Elkins, a former Rhodes Scholar and president of the University of Maryland, College Park from 1954 to 1978. This prestigious award is for faculty within USM who are working on innovative projects focused on the use of generative AI to advance academic transformation, foster improvements in access, affordability, quality of outcomes, and/or stewardship of people’s time, money, and other scarce resources.

“The professorship will allow me, through the Center for Social Science Scholarship, to first assist faculty and students in understanding how to leverage advances in computing and AI to address new research questions and scale their research in ways that were unfathomable during Dr. Elkins tenure,” says Stokan, associate professor of political science, who earned one of three $10,000 awards. He will use the funding to complete Computational Public Administration—his first book written with R, a free programming language used for statistical computing and graphics—about computational social science methods focused on addressing public policy and administration topics, such as climate change and economic development. 

The funding will also support the design and implementation of five hands-on training modules and workshops tailored for faculty, students, and community organizations. Participants will learn to use generative AI large language models (LLM) like ChatGPT and R. The goal is to help participants answer novel and important research questions, develop marketable technical skills, to work more effectively with data, and better communicate the results of their analyses with the broader community.

“I am deeply honored to receive the Elkins Professorship, in honor of the late Wilson H. Elkins, who was a transformational leader, administrator, and educator,” says Stokan. “This award is important to me because it not only provides support but also affirms my commitment to accommodating learners at all levels of experience in computational social sciences, promoting accessibility, equity, and methodological transparency.”

Initial support for the project came from the UMBC’s Faculty Development Center, the AOK Library’s Digital Scholarship Services, iHARP/Data Science Scholars, and the Institute for Public Leadership at the University of Maryland, College Park.

The workshops will be offered through CS3 in collaboration with CGC-SCIPE, the UMBC Division of Information Technology, and ScaleS. A lecture series component, which will include external speakers, is being co-sponsored with the Department of English, the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Public Health, and the Department of Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communications. 

Register for the fall semester’s workshop series on AI, LLMs, and computational methods.

As the Baltimore Orioles gear up for the last months of the baseball season, the Baltimore Ravens are flexing their wings as the regular football season begins in September. For Baltimoreans, that means savoring their last bites of foot-long sausages at Camden Yards and getting ready for the Ravens’ tailgate parties at M&T Stadium.

For Dennis Coates, professor of economics, it is neither the beginning or ending of a season. As a sports economist, Coates lives and breathes sports 365 days a year. Sports economics is the study of everything that encompasses sports—player salaries, stadiums, major leagues, broadcasting and media rights—and how it all affects the fans and the larger economy. It’s that kind of passion that inspired him to organize the first sports economics conference at UMBC in 2024 and then again in 2025, and the reason why the North American Association of Sports Economists (NAASE) established an award in his and his long-time research partner, Brad R. Humphreys’ honor.

NAASE, of which Coates is a founding member, voted to establish the Coates-Humphreys NAASE Distinguished Research Award in honor of the decades of research and contributions Coates and Humphreys, the associate dean of academic affairs at the John Chambers College of Business and Economics at West Virginia University, have made to the field of sports economics. 

“NAASE’s executive committee is pleased to create this award to honor your distinguished scholarly records in sports economics, contributions to NAASE, including serving as presidents of the organization, extensive activities connecting NAASE to sports economics communities outside North America, and your service to the broader sports economics field,” wrote NAASE president E. Frank Stephenson, in the award letter. “The committee has also selected you as the inaugural winners.”

This year marks Coates’s 30th year teaching at UMBC and working with Humphreys, a former associate professor of economics at UMBC. Humphreys is currently a professor of economics at West Virginia University and associate dean of academic affairs and research. When Coates is not teaching Retrievers the ins and outs of sports economics, he edits the sports economics book series for Springer Publishing and serves as the editor of the Journal of Sports Economics. The journal publishes research in labor market research, labor-management relations, collective bargaining, wage determination, local public finance, and other fields related to the economics of sports. Humphreys is editor-in-chief of Contemporary Economic Policy, a general interest economics journal, and serves on the editorial boards of six sports economics research journals. In the last five years, Coates and Humphreys have co-authored six research papers ranging from topics on voting behavior in the NCAA, public policy toward professional sports stadiums, and the impact of professional sports stadiums on local economies.

“I was totally surprised by the creation of this award and that Brad and I were the first to receive it,” says Coates. “I am honored and humbled that my colleagues think so highly of me, my research, and my contribution to the discipline that they would create an award in my name.”

Learn more about UMBC’s economics department.

Figuring out what to get someone for their birthday can be both fun and daunting, especially when it’s their 250th birthday. On December 16, 1775, Jane Austen was born in Steventon, Hampshire, England. Margie Burns, an assistant teaching professor of English literature, is a lifelong superfan of Jane Austen’s six novels: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion. 

With Hollywood movies and New York Times-bestselling spinoffs of Austen’s novels, it might seem that everything there is to say about the prolific author has already been said. Burns begs to differ as she ushers in a year of Austen celebrations worldwide with her latest contribution to the Austen canon withJane Austen, Abolitionist: The Loaded History of the Phrase “Pride and Prejudice”(McFarland, 2024). This new insight into Austen’s life allows Burns to open up a fresh discussion for Austen enthusiasts and to attract new readers interested in female authors who challenge societal norms by writing leading female characters with bold opinions. Burns discusses her Austen journey in a Q&A below.

Q: When did you become interested in Jane Austen and why? 

A: I first read Pride and Prejudice as a college freshman. At that time, we had a full year of freshman English, focused on literature, alert reading, and writing. This was a great opportunity, even after I had taken a course on major works of literature in high school.

I was hooked. In time, I read the rest of Austen’s books. Naturally, when I like an author, I seek out everything else they’ve written and devour that as well. With Austen, as with Shakespeare, my interest deepened over time, reinforced (rather than undermined) by academic rigor. Given Austen’s current global standing, I have come to think of Jane Austen as England’s second Shakespeare.

Q: Why did you choose to write Jane Austen Abolitionist?

A: I was flabbergasted to discover how widespread, prevalent, and ethically fundamental the phrase “pride and prejudice” was in Britain and even in America before Austen chose it as her novel title. I was even more powerfully struck by finding out, over and over again across more than two centuries, that “pride and prejudice” as a phrase was being used as a critique of slavery and the slave trade. There was absolutely no one else writing about this aspect of Austen’s work.

Once I dug deeper, I found hundreds of examples. Most of the discussion about the Austens and slavery has focused on Austen’s more remote relatives. I do not believe that Jane Austen was unduly influenced by family finances involving her non-nuclear relatives. Her immediate family opposed the slave trade. More importantly, the evidence is overwhelming that she opposed it. 

I would like to produce a second edition of the book. There is further relevant and closely related material, literary and historical evidence, through the end of the U.S. Civil War. 

Q: What is your favorite Austen book?

A: That is a hard question. My “favorite” Austen book is probably whichever one I am working on/doing research on, or writing about at a given time. 

Q: Which Austen character do you like to quote?

A: Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice says one of my favorite quotes: “You shall not, for the sake of one individual, change the meaning of principle and integrity, nor endeavour to persuade yourself or me, that selfishness is prudence, and insensibility of danger, security for happiness.” (Elizabeth is talking about Charlotte Lucas’s decision to marry Mr. Collins. )

Q: Why would anyone be interested in Austen’s work centuries after it was published?

A: I dislike the word “themes” and try to avoid it, but there is no doubt that Austen’s heroines, their situation/s, and their ethics still speak to readers today, and in a language easily understood by contemporary readers. The readers are also being joined by millions of viewers, as the ever-evolving stream of film adaptations from Hollywood, Bollywood, and elsewhere demonstrates. 

I am not alone in seeing that part of Austen’s appeal lies in the successful transmission of ethics through her heroines: pro-health, pro-spirit, and pro-ethical stature, although not in a simplistic and preachy way. Currently, of course, the appeal is broadcast farther through a range of media and genres, from podcast to parody.

Read more about Burns’s insights into Austen’s ideas on abolitionism in “The Loaded History of the Phrase ‘Pride and Prejudice” article she wrote for The Conversation. 

Burns will present her research at the annual general meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America in Baltimore this fall 2025.

Learn more about UMBC’s English department.

Header graphic: Design by Jill Blum/UMBC. Headshot by Brad Ziegler/UMBC. Book cover courtesy of Margie Burns.

Over 10 years ago, Tania Lizarazo met with Justa Mena Córdoba in Chocó, Colombia. Before Mena Córdoba passed away, Lizarazo promised to tell her story as one of the founding commissioners of the Gender Commission of COCOMACIA, Colombia’s largest Afro-Colombian peasants’ association.

With her new book, Postconflict Utopias: Everyday Survival in Chocó, Colombia (University of Illinois Press, 2024), Lizarazo fulfills that promise. “It means a lot to me to publish this book as this was my first collaborative research project,” says Lizarazo, associate professor of modern languages, linguistics, and intercultural communication and global studies. “I promised Justa that I would do my best to share her story and legacy of peace-building amidst decades of ongoing violence by supporting women’s daily work.”

Lizarazo’s interest in Latin American cultural studies and transnational feminist research led her to explore the Gender Commission of COCOMACIA. Curious to learn more, Lizarazo reached out to Mena Córdoba. She invited Lizarazo to her home and the headquarters of the commission, both in Chocó, located in the northwest, bordering Panama and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and where the largest Afro-Colombian community in the country lives. For over a decade, Mena Córdoba served as Lizarazo’s friend, mentor, and fellow researcher.

Many scholars, says Lizarazo, both Colombian like herself, and foreign, research the Colombian Pacific and use ethnography as their main research approach. She notes that while she uses ethnography, her work also places the community on equal footing with researchers. The book documents the collaboration between Lizarazo and the Afro-Colombian women of the Gender Commission. The team used digital storytelling tools to document the commission’s daily efforts to build networks and share resources that strengthen their families, schools, jobs, and communities. 

“Sometimes we highlight protests but ignore the daily mundane actions that build over time and make collective survival possible. This is the case for Black women in the Colombian Pacific,” explains Lizarazo for The Conversation. “Their solidarity is a reminder that peace and justice are a collaborative, everyday effort. As Justa told me in 2012: “One cannot change the world by herself.”

Learn more about Lizarazo’s collaboration with fellow UMBC faculty María Célleri, Yolanda Valencia, and Thania Muñoz to document the experiences of Latinx communities with Latinx communities in D.C., Maryland, and Virginia.

Visit the Walters Art Museum’s new “Latin American Art/ Arte Latinoamericano” exhibit, where Lizarazo contributed her expertise in Colombian history.

Ever wonder what dinosaur poets would write about if they knew their moment of extinction was near? That’s one of the questions poet Tanya Olson, associate teaching professor of English, considered while writing her latest book, Born Backwards (YesYes Books, 2024). As she worked on the collection, Olson reflected on extinction and preservation—of food, objects, experiences, relationships, places, and people, especially butch life in the American South during the 1980s and ’90s. 

“The poems of Born Backwards remember anyone who feels out of place—in a body, a hometown, or a century,” says Olson. “In a time when such histories are again a threat, remembering becomes urgent.”

One of Oslon’s favorite parts of teaching is guiding students through the research process for their writing. Some of Olson’s research for the 20 poems in Born Backwards draws on her life growing up in the South. She shares episodes of her time on her grandmother’s farm doing chores, learning to drive from her father—starting with a push mower—and helping her mom tend a large vegetable garden. Alongside these experiences are reflections on questions of being queer and the decision to leave in search of a more queer-friendly place.

Olson also draws inspiration from the MTV revolution of the 1980s and the country music she heard growing up—artists like Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, and Loretta Lynn—as well as the trailblazing career of k.d. lang, a pioneer for lesbian country music artists. Reflecting on extinction and preservation, Olson contemplates what could be lost if she is the last butch to remember smoky lesbian bars and to witness the decline of butch culture, wondering who will preserve these histories in the future.

Get tickets to see Tanya Olson at Profs & Pints Baltimore: Queer Country on Monday, August 18, 2025.

Read more of Tanya Olson’s poetry in Boyishly (Yesyes, 2013) and Stay (Yesyes, 2019).

Header graphic: Design by Jill Blum/UMBC. Book cover and headshot courtesy of Tanya Olson.

If you could develop a treatment to improve the care of millions of people with opioid use disorder (OUD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), where would you start? For doctoral students like Laurel Meyer, with a passion for serving this community, the answer begins with funded clinical research opportunities and faculty mentorship. 

In 2020, Rebecca Schacht, clinical psychologist and associate professor of psychology, and Kevin R. Wenzel, a clinical psychologist and director of research at Baltimore-based Maryland Treatment Centers, welcomed Meyer into the human services psychology doctoral program as a research coordinator in their study. Schacht and Wenzel were conducting a randomized trial of written exposure therapy (WET) for people with PTSD in residential OUD and substance use disorder (SUD) treatment settings. WET is an evidence-based treatment for PTSD in which patients process their trauma by writing an in-depth narrative about a specific traumatic event in five sessions. 

“At the start of the project, I contributed to research design and protocol development. I then collaborated with clinical staff at the treatment facility to identify and recruit eligible patients,” says Meyer, who, along with fellow research assistant Samantha Berg, a fifth-year human services psychology doctoral student, had the opportunity to share the findings as co-authors on the article “A pilot test of Written Exposure Therapy for PTSD in residential substance use treatment” in the American Journal on Addictions. 

“Throughout the trial, I worked directly with participants in several capacities, including assessing eligibility for the study, providing Written Exposure Therapy as a study therapist, and conducting follow-up interviews to understand participants’ experiences,” says Meyer.

Thanks to the team’s rigorous research, Schacht and Wenzel, the co-principal investigator, are scaling up their research with a grant of over $3 million from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to develop and test Written Exposure in Substance Treatment (WEST), an adapted version of WET for use with people with OUD in residential SUD treatment.

“One of the most exciting aspects of grants like this one is that they include funding for Ph.D. students. This project will support at least two doctoral students throughout the six years of the project, including summer funding,” says Schacht, the director of the UMBC Psychology Training Clinic. “Most doctoral students serve as either research assistants or teaching assistants. These positions provide students with mentored professional development and include tuition, health insurance, and stipends to support living expenses.”

The research cycle

Now a sixth-year doctoral student, Meyer is passing the baton to the next generation of researchers in the human services psychology doctoral program, one of whom is second-year doctoral student Alexis Alfano. This summer, Alfano has been preparing assessments by programming measures in Qualtrics, an online survey tool to build and distribute surveys, collect responses, and analyze response data. Because the research involves human participants, Alfano is assisting in developing a detailed plan for participant involvement to submit to the Institutional Review Board for review and approval. She also contributed to the development of the procedure manual and materials used during interviews and focus groups, and assisted with programming forms, transcribing qualitative data, and data entry. 

“I had the opportunity to become involved in Project WEST by being a student in Dr. Schacht’s lab and receiving her mentorship,” says Alfano. “For the last two years, I have participated in a variety of tasks, including recruiting and interviewing both patients and staff at the Maryland Treatment Centers to gather feedback on Written Exposure Therapy.”

Maryland Treatment Centers have a longstanding history of conducting clinical research trials to improve patient care and treatment delivery, with the support of patients and staff, as well as researchers and universities. The seven-year partnership between Schacht and Wenzel offers students a real-world clinical setting to develop hands-on clinical skills essential for treating patients, collaborating with center staff and fellow researchers, and gaining the experience needed to become clinical psychologists and conduct clinical research.

“Patients are at the center of the research. Their experiences, insights, and feedback help us identify which aspects of the treatment are most effective and which need to be adjusted for maximum impact,” says Schacht. “We consider people to be the experts of their own experience, and their perspectives are essential to designing an intervention that’s aligned with their needs.” Schacht hopes that, by the end of the project, the team will have an effective intervention that can be widely implemented, making WEST the gold-standard treatment for PTSD available in residential and other SUD treatment contexts.

The long game

Doctoral training is a years-long process. In the coming year, Meyer is completing her predoctoral internship in an integrated healthcare setting where she is receiving further clinical training in evidence-based treatment for PTSD. She is excited to move closer to her career goal to combine both clinical practice and clinically focused research. 

“My role as research coordinator in Dr. Schacht’s research on Written Exposure Therapy has deepened my passion for clinical research and has been instrumental in shaping my long-term career goals,” says Meyer. “Being part of research that has such a direct impact on clinical care has inspired me to pursue a career in which I can use science and clinical practice to enhance treatment outcomes and quality of life for individuals who have experienced trauma and substance use.”

Learn more about UMBC’s psychology graduate programs.

It wasn’t your usual scientific research presentation. Two dancers—one representing a robot and the other a human—take turns moving around each other. As the dance progresses the human is at first fearful, then curious, and finally happy. 

The performance in June during the Movement, Music, and Brain Health National Science Foundation (NSF) AccelNet meeting on the UMBC campus was the brainchild of three UMBC faculty who have joined forces to explore whether and how dancing robots might offer humans new tools to improve their mental health. The research piggybacks off established practices of human-to-human dance/movement therapy, which can be used to treat some mental health challenges, such as schizophrenia, anxiety and depression. 

The exact form that robotic dance therapy might take, and the range of mental health conditions it could treat, are still large open-ended questions for the team, which is led by Ramana Vinjamuri, an associate professor in computer science and electrical engineering, who has done extensive work in brain-computer interfaces, and Andrea Kleinsmith, an associate professor in information systems, who specializes in ways that computers can assess humans’ emotions. 

“As a healthcare opportunity, dancing with a robot may sound weird at first,” says Ann Sofie Clemmensen, an associate professor of dance, who is also part of the interdisciplinary team. “Why not just dance with a human?” But, she says, people who are socially isolated or struggle with the stressors of human interactions might benefit from robot partners. “As humans we project emotions on objects, but the objects do not judge back,” she says. 

(l-r): Ramana Vinjamuri, Andrea Kleinsmith, and Ann Sofie Clemmensen are collaborating on a project to explore a possible role for robots in dance therapy. (Photos courtesy of Vinjamuri, Kleinsmith, and Clemmensen)

“The most exciting thing about this project for me is the collaboration,” says Vinjamuri. “I’ve never done something like this, and so the possibility to bring these fields together to tackle an important issue like mental health is super exciting.”

First steps

The groundwork for the research was laid as part of over a decade of work in Vinjamuri’s lab searching for “alphabets” or “synergies” of hand movements and associated brain activity that combine to build the variety of our everyday movements. Vinjamuri’s Ph.D. student Parthan Olikkal had recently developed contactless human motion tracking methods, which he applied when teaching humanoid robots these alphabets to form new movements. 

Against this backdrop, the spark for the interdisciplinary venture was struck when the College of Engineering and Information Technology (COEIT) launched a “COEIT Interdisciplinary Projects” program to encourage faculty to explore collaborations across disciplines to tackle big challenges. Vinjamuri reached out to Kleinsmith and Clemmensen to discuss the possibility of teaming up.

Together, the researchers developed a project proposal to study key questions surrounding the idea of robot-assisted dance therapy. They named the proposal SIVAM after the Indian mythological god of dance (also short for “Synergy-based, Intuitive, Virtual and Augmented therapy for Mental health”). The research would look into questions such as whether the coordination in a person’s arms and legs could be a proxy measure of mental well-being, how existing dance therapy movements affect brain activity, and how a humanoid robot dance partner compares in effectiveness to a flesh-and-blood one.

Creative solutions at the technological frontiers

Like any big endeavor, the project encountered unexpected hurdles. An existing robot that the team had couldn’t move fast enough or with the full range of motion needed for a dance partner. (A new robot will soon be ordered.) The team also had to wait for delivery of a special EEG cap that could measure a dancer’s brain activity without the typical gel and wires that would get in the way. The cap was also equipped to filter out the signal noise that comes from a person moving around. 

When the team realized they would have to wait for the humanoid robot, they pivoted to developing a digital avatar. They designed a camera and software system to track a person’s motions and then created a digital representation of a person to mirror the movements back, a technique in dance/movement therapy.

Developing the motion tracking system was a big part of the project to date. “Even just a few years ago, it was so much more difficult to digitally capture a person’s movements without them wearing reflective markers that a camera can easily track,” says Kleinsmith. Now, the team is using the latest in computer vision and machine learning tools to implement a markerless tracking system. Eliminating the need for specialized attire should make the system more accessible and useful.

The team also laid the groundwork for the next stages of the project by testing sensors, including the new cap and wireless sensors that can measure physiological signals such as heart rate, skin conductance, and body temperature. All the equipment will help the team test novel ways of assessing, and perhaps ultimately altering, human subjects’ emotional states.

“If you tighten your body, that may mean anger or fright, if you are more loose, you are more relaxed,” says Clemmensen. “And it’s possible that you could then guide a person through movement into that emotional state. The next part of this research is to get the data on that, and I’m quite excited about it.”

A technology-infused stage debut

The June performance was a chance for the team to creatively demonstrate their progress to brain researchers and artists from around the world. 

In the first half of the performance, the human dancer, performed by UMBC graduate Juju Ayoub ’25, dance, and a “robot” dancer, performed by Sarah McHale ’24, dance, sit opposite one another and take turns moving. Their movements are captured and displayed on a large screen by digital avatars. In the second half, the human and robot meet on the dance floor, while the human cycles through the emotions of fear, curiosity, and happiness. Sensors on Ayoub measured her brain activity, heart rate, and other signals that capture emotions, and displayed them on the screen. The second half of the performance was improvised by the dancers, within an accumulative structure provided by Clemmensen.

On left, dancers Juju Ayoub and Sarah McHale get ready to perform while Ph.D. student Parthan Olikkal sets up equipment. On right, Sarah McHale dances in front of the digital avatars. (Photos by Kiirstn Pagan ’11)

“Philosophically speaking, the first part of the performance represents humans and robots working in their own spaces. Part two is where they’re trying to work together, going through these phases of fear, curiosity, and then finally collaboration—and hopefully a happy collaboration,” says Vinjamuri.

The human researchers on the project have certainly found their own happy collaboration. 

Clemmensen said she appreciated how the group’s focus could zoom out and in, transitioning from discussions of big ideas to tackling tricky troubleshooting for one piece of equipment.

“I would like to see if I can take that verbal process into the creative space of dance choreography too,” she says.

The students involved in the project—Olikkal, fellow Ph.D. students Sruthi Sundharram and Golnaz Moharrer, and undergraduates Oritsejolomisan Mebaghanje ’25, computer science, and first-year computer science student Viraj Janeja—agree it was a mind-stretching and rewarding experience.

“I was very excited to be involved in the performance, which was an unusual and creative experience,” says Sundharram, who is a first-year Ph.D. student in computer science in Vinjamuri’s lab and who helped set up and connect the cap and sensors before the dance. “It was nerve-racking right before the start, fearing that something wouldn’t work,” Sundharram laughed. But the dancers helped ease her jitters and the performance went well.

“The best part of the experience for me was seeing the virtual environment for the project come alive,” says Mebaghanje, who worked as the lead software developer on the project. “I also really enjoyed working with my team and debugging issues together.”

Olikkal, who has been involved in the project from the beginning, and who worked primarily on the motion capture system, says he’s been able to hone his career aspirations in a meaningful way after joining Vinjamuri’s lab in 2019 as a master’s student. 

“Once I started really putting my heart into the research and seeing how these systems can help people, maybe not always immediately but certainly down the line, I felt like I had found my calling,” he says.

After the dancers exited the stage of the Fine Arts Recital Hall, Vinjamuri took the microphone to thank the whole team. And he hinted at the exciting work that lies ahead: “Maybe next time there will be a real robot on stage.”