Since fall 2021, UMBC’s Interdisciplinary Consortium for Applied Research in the Environment (ICARE) has supported master’s students pursuing environmental science research related to Baltimore and the surrounding area. Students in the program have studied everything from “forever chemical” contamination in local waterways to educational outreach using horseshoe crabs to stormwater management. Trainees have looked at urban bat populations, community members’ knowledge of zero-waste practices, and oyster aquaculture. Program alumni have accepted roles with the U.S. Forest Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, The National Academies of Sciences, Baltimore Tree Trust, and more. 

To increase the relevance and benefit of students’ projects, members of community partner organizations co-advise students on their research. Co-advisors have come from organizations like Baltimore Green Space, Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources, and the South Baltimore Community Land Trust. ICARE began with a handful of faculty members from all three colleges at UMBC who wanted to collaborate more closely. Over time, it grew into an NSF-funded training program that today includes more than 100 people and 36 organizations.   

Earlier this month, the ICARE program celebrated its impact with “ICARE Day,” including a research poster session and luncheon with keynote address. 

“You’re combining the skills, knowledge, and perspectives you gained here in ICARE with your already strong commitment to environmental justice to make the world better for people and the ecosystems we live in,” said Tamra Mendelson, professor of biological sciences and ICARE program director, of program alumni, while members of the current cohort are “flexing those skills, nurturing your passions, and finding your way toward meaningful and consequential work in the environmental sector.”

Those opportunities are plentiful today, according to keynote speaker Fernando Miralles-Wilhelm, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. 

“What’s happening now is that individuals realize that every single thing we do—every single economic activity we engage in, from the food you eat, to the clothing you wear, to how we power our cities—everything hinges on the environment and natural resources,” he said. “It’s not just about having a nice landscape—the environment impacts economic bottom lines.”

Current trainees, set to graduate in the next few months, are pursuing a diverse set of projects. For example, Isabella Molatore has been studying the presence of invasive fish species in Baltimore Harbor through a combination of angler interviews and DNA testing of harbor water samples. Donovin Smith is exploring novel methods to detect heavy metals in the air and using the data to measure how proximity to railways, incinerators, and other factors affects air pollution. And Will Kaselow has compared the roles and effects of different entities that influence environmental education, such as nonprofits, various levels of government, and local institutions like schools and community centers.    

Despite undeniable environmental challenges, Miralles-Wilhelm ended the event on a hopeful note. 

“If you look at the news, you get bombarded by so much negative stuff. You may end up believing that the world is becoming a worse place. However, I counter that by saying that since World War II, every single human development indicator and every single environmental and development indicator around the world has gotten better,” Miralles-Wilhelm said. “We’ve spent quite a bit of effort—scientists, policymakers, and investors—to try to make a better world, and it is working. It may not be working at the pace that you want it to work, it may not be improving everywhere at the same time, but it’s also undeniable that we have gotten better.”

ICARE trainees and alumni, armed with skills from technical laboratory techniques to community organizing, are now poised to contribute to and accelerate that positive trend.   

Most people wouldn’t guess horseshoe crabs—ancient arthropods with hard, round carapaces and long, spiky tails—when asked what animals you might find in a K-12 classroom. But Jessica Baniak ’23, biological sciences, is collaborating with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to shift kids’ perspectives of the alien-looking critters and create opportunities for inquiry-based learning.

Today, Baniak is a student in the ICARE program, an environmental science master’s program led by UMBC biology professor Tamra Mendelson. ICARE students study local environmental issues and include community partners on their master’s thesis committees. 

Horseshoe crabs congregate on Maryland and Delaware beaches to mate each spring, and the last two years Baniak has collected some of their eggs with a research permit from the Maryland DNR. Each female can produce upwards of 20,000 eggs. Baniak takes the eggs back to a lab at the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology (IMET), a multi-institution research facility on Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, and raises them until they’re about a centimeter across. 

Then Baniak delivers the baby crabs to elementary, middle, and high school classrooms in Howard, Carroll, and Baltimore counties. This year, 10 schools received crabs. Some teachers use the crabs in their curriculum, and some crabs are tended by student environmental clubs. Students run basic experiments that develop their science reasoning skills, like comparing growth rates in different hatchery setups. 

Finding the sweet spot

It’s tricky to successfully raise the crabs to adulthood. Baniak visits each classroom a couple of times a year and makes suggestions to improve the crab habitats. Factors like feed, temperature, salinity, and more play a role in their survival. For her master’s research, Baniak is working out the ideal setup for successful crab-rearing with a focus on temperature. Higher temperatures produce faster growth, but some baby crabs perish in the heat. Cooler temps cut the mortality rate, but slow growth. 

Baniak’s goal is to find the sweet spot that produces the most healthy crabs in a short amount of time. Why does efficiency matter? Because eager students aren’t the only ones interested in raising crabs.

Companies extract a compound from horseshoe crab blood that is used to detect bacterial contamination in pharmaceuticals. The blood can’t be harvested until the crabs are about 10 years old, Baniak explains, so raising them in captivity isn’t economical (it’s also challenging). Instead, reintroducing young crabs to their natural habitat is “a way that companies can help mitigate how much they’ve taken out of the wild,” Baniak says. Baniak’s work will help optimize these reintroduction programs for the industry—and at the same time, give kids a unique learning opportunity.

‘Everything all at once’

As a child, the National Aquarium in Baltimore—directly across the pier from IMET—inspired Baniak to pursue marine biology. Today her experiences range well beyond horseshoe crabs. As an undergraduate, she had a summer internship at an oyster hatchery. “During the breeding season—that’s when you work really long hours,” she says. “You have to do everything all at once.”

Counting surviving oysters, mating specific oyster pairs, and cleaning tanks—all while squeezing in work on experiments running at the hatchery—filled her days. One project involved developing a protocol to anesthetize oysters, which made it possible to collect tissue samples without killing the oyster. Baniak also assisted with the hatchery’s softshell clam initiative.

For another internship, she worked at the Maryland Pesticide Education Network, which promotes safer alternatives to harmful pesticides. During the academic year, she found time to participate in UMBC’s tae-kwon do club and play club volleyball. 

Sharing the joy in science

After she graduates with her master’s next spring, Baniak hopes to move on to a role in a federal agency like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She wants to continue to contribute to outreach programs like the horseshoe crab project. 

“That’s my motivation for continuing in science, because I want to make more programs like that,” Baniak says. “I like ICARE because you’re working with other people in the community and not just researching a really niche subject.”

After she transferred to UMBC during the pandemic to be closer to home, UMBC faculty members helped her stay committed to her biological sciences degree. Maggie Holland, professor of geography and environmental systems, “brought back the joy into science after returning from online learning,” Baniak says. “She seemed to genuinely care about me as a student and about the subject she was teaching.”

Mendelson, too, made an impact. “She’s put a lot of effort into the ICARE program and wants to see all of us succeed,” Baniak says.

At the end of the school year, Baniak will travel with the students to release their horseshoe crabs at Sandy Point State Park and watch them wriggle across the sand and swim into the Chesapeake Bay, heading for life’s next phase. 

Most people wouldn’t guess horseshoe crabs—ancient arthropods with hard, round carapaces and long, spiky tails—when asked what animals you might find in a K-12 classroom. But Jessica Baniak ’23, biological sciences, is collaborating with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to shift kids’ perspectives of the alien-looking critters and create opportunities for inquiry-based learning.

Today, Baniak is a student in the ICARE program, an environmental science master’s program led by UMBC biology professor Tamra Mendelson. ICARE students study local environmental issues and include community partners on their master’s thesis committees. 

Horseshoe crabs congregate on Maryland and Delaware beaches to mate each spring, and the last two years Baniak has collected some of their eggs with a research permit from the Maryland DNR. Each female can produce upwards of 20,000 eggs. Baniak takes the eggs back to a lab at the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology (IMET), a multi-institution research facility on Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, and raises them until they’re about a centimeter across. 

Then Baniak delivers the baby crabs to elementary, middle, and high school classrooms in Howard, Carroll, and Baltimore counties. This year, 10 schools received crabs. Some teachers use the crabs in their curriculum, and some crabs are tended by student environmental clubs. Students run basic experiments that develop their science reasoning skills, like comparing growth rates in different hatchery setups. 

Finding the sweet spot

It’s tricky to successfully raise the crabs to adulthood. Baniak visits each classroom a couple of times a year and makes suggestions to improve the crab habitats. Factors like feed, temperature, salinity, and more play a role in their survival. For her master’s research, Baniak is working out the ideal setup for successful crab-rearing with a focus on temperature. Higher temperatures produce faster growth, but some baby crabs perish in the heat. Cooler temps cut the mortality rate, but slow growth. 

Baniak’s goal is to find the sweet spot that produces the most healthy crabs in a short amount of time. Why does efficiency matter? Because eager students aren’t the only ones interested in raising crabs.

Companies extract a compound from horseshoe crab blood that is used to detect bacterial contamination in pharmaceuticals. The blood can’t be harvested until the crabs are about 10 years old, Baniak explains, so raising them in captivity isn’t economical (it’s also challenging). Instead, reintroducing young crabs to their natural habitat is “a way that companies can help mitigate how much they’ve taken out of the wild,” Baniak says. Baniak’s work will help optimize these reintroduction programs for the industry—and at the same time, give kids a unique learning opportunity.

‘Everything all at once’

As a child, the National Aquarium in Baltimore—directly across the pier from IMET—inspired Baniak to pursue marine biology. Today her experiences range well beyond horseshoe crabs. As an undergraduate, she had a summer internship at an oyster hatchery. “During the breeding season—that’s when you work really long hours,” she says. “You have to do everything all at once.”

Counting surviving oysters, mating specific oyster pairs, and cleaning tanks—all while squeezing in work on experiments running at the hatchery—filled her days. One project involved developing a protocol to anesthetize oysters, which made it possible to collect tissue samples without killing the oyster. Baniak also assisted with the hatchery’s softshell clam initiative.

For another internship, she worked at the Maryland Pesticide Education Network, which promotes safer alternatives to harmful pesticides. During the academic year, she found time to participate in UMBC’s tae-kwon do club and play club volleyball. 

Sharing the joy in science

After she graduates with her master’s next spring, Baniak hopes to move on to a role in a federal agency like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She wants to continue to contribute to outreach programs like the horseshoe crab project. 

“That’s my motivation for continuing in science, because I want to make more programs like that,” Baniak says. “I like ICARE because you’re working with other people in the community and not just researching a really niche subject.”

After she transferred to UMBC during the pandemic to be closer to home, UMBC faculty members helped her stay committed to her biological sciences degree. Maggie Holland, professor of geography and environmental systems, “brought back the joy into science after returning from online learning,” Baniak says. “She seemed to genuinely care about me as a student and about the subject she was teaching.”

Mendelson, too, made an impact. “She’s put a lot of effort into the ICARE program and wants to see all of us succeed,” Baniak says.

At the end of the school year, Baniak will travel with the students to release their horseshoe crabs at Sandy Point State Park and watch them wriggle across the sand and swim into the Chesapeake Bay, heading for life’s next phase. 

Spring on UMBC’s main campus brings a host of familiar sights and sounds: blooms on the magnolia trees, the chatter of red-winged blackbirds calling from the reeds around Library Pond, greening grass on the campus Quad, and black-and-gold-bedecked Grit Guides leading groups of prospective Retrievers around what may soon become a home away from home.

The guides cover the usual highlights—Academic Row, the Retriever Activity Center, the AOK Library, eating establishments, and residential halls. UMBC is a place to live, to learn, and to find community. And while some of the functions of campus spaces are obvious, others are often hidden.

Look more closely, and you’ll see faculty and students turning the everyday infrastructure and green oases of UMBC into out-of-the-ordinary laboratories. Beeswax sculptures, tactile maps, robots helping other robots—read on to discover some of the amazing ways Retrievers are using the campus itself for experiential learning and diverse research.

Written by: Catherine Meyers & Sarah L. Hansen, M.S. ’15

Two students wearing knee-high waders stand several meters apart in the middle of a rapidly flowing stream at the north end of UMBC’s campus. One releases a Ping-Pong ball, which bobs along with the current, as the second starts a timer, stopping it when the ball reaches his feet to determine the stream’s flow rate.

Nearby, another student measures the size of rocks in the streambed using a device called a gravelometer—a rectangular piece of metal with square holes of various sizes. The smallest hole a given rock will fit through becomes its measurement.

Farther along, other students capture photos that include reference posts on the stream bank. Each small group of students also takes measurements of the water depth at one-foot intervals along strings hung from one bank to the other. The students (with the help of specialized software) will use these measurements and photos to generate 3D models of the streambed.

“It’s a little DIY, but we get some amazing pictures,” says Charles Kaylor, the instructor and director of GIS and cartography labs in the Department of Geography and Environmental Systems (GES).

This is the “stream lab” in Exploring the Environment: A Geospatial Perspective, a course best known in the UMBC community for its semesterly launch of a dozen or so brightly-colored balloons that dot the campus skyline. Throughout the semester, students train their brains in the ways geographic data can help answer a wide range of research questions.

For the students, there are a range of perks to the course. “It’s cool to see different applications of computer science, which can sometimes feel pretty theoretical,” says George Rush ’24, computer science. Luke Thomas ’27, GES, who was partnered with Rush, is grateful for the senior’s support with the programming aspects of the coursework.

Rhonda Plofkin, Ph.D. student in GES and the graduate assistant for the class, concurs that having students with different strengths facilitates peer learning. “This is real-life stuff that geomorphologists do in the field,” she adds.

For some, the benefits are just as real, but simpler: “The cold water wakes me up,” Anthony Roytenberg ’24, computer science, says with a smile.

When Alieh Rezaei arrived at UMBC from Iran, she couldn’t take her eyes off the ground. Almost immediately she was mesmerized by the flora and fauna of her new residence, and as an master of fine
arts student in the intermedia and digital arts (IMDA) program, she decided to incorporate pieces of UMBC into her artwork. She walked around campus, picking up windfalls of seeds and exploring hidden nooks of nature. A place that would come to be her sanctuary,
Rezaei, M.F.A. ’22, says, was Joseph Beuys Sculpture Park.

“The solidity of the stones alongside the growth of the oaksand the evolving shape of the garden reflect concepts of erosion and growth,” says Rezaei. “As an immigrant, I found solace in my attachment to the settled and solid stones, representing a sense of
grounding to me.”

Rezaei was drawn to UMBC’s M.F.A. program because of its multidisciplinary approach and the freedom she felt to choose an unconventional path. She praised Kathy O’Dell, IMDA professor emerita, who was her advisor. “Kathy was someone who—it was like I was floating in the air and Kathy held my hand and grounded me. She was very supportive for the whole journey.”

A photograph from Rezaei’s three-hour performance “The Tongue in the Landscape” at the Joseph Beuys Sculpture Park featuring the artist laboriously peeling the wax layer off the pieces of bark. Photo courtesy of Rezaei.

To create the art for her thesis project, Rezaei used almost exclusively materials collected on or near campus, including fallen tree bark, shattered wood, and seeds. She bought her main material—beeswax— from Baltimore beekeepers. One piece, “The Collective Womb,” featured hundreds of native seeds, called Devil’s Darning Needles, held together by beeswax around orange peels.

When the pieces were finished, Rezaei immediately knew the stage she wanted to showcase them on—Joseph Beuys Sculpture Park. “I installed my pieces there and had a performance as a way to extend the concept of public sculpture, aiming to reactivate the space and revive the concept of ecological engagement central to Beuys’ 7000 Oaks project.”

A composite of several microscope images of phages discovered by UMBC students in the Phage Hunters program demonstrates the variety of shapes phages can take. Photo by Tagide deCarvalho.

IchabodCrane. MindFlayer. Annihilus. TonyStarch. These are viruses previously completely unknown to science discovered by UMBC students in the Phage Hunters program, a two-course undergraduate genetics and bioinformatics sequence. 

Since its launch in 2008, UMBC students have discovered 661 viruses that infect bacteria, called phages. Ninety-seven of them originated in samples collected on campus, with the most popular location being the Library Pond. Seventy-seven phages have been sequenced and 60 have been fully characterized and submitted to GenBank, an international digital repository of genetic and protein sequences. 

Steven Caruso ’94, Ph.D. ’02, biological sciences, principal lecturer of biological sciences, runs the genetics course where the students collect samples, isolate their phages, image them with help from Tagide deCarvalho, “and growth,” says Rezaei. “As an immigrant, I found present their findings. They learn foundational laboratory techniques and get a taste for research. 

Phage Hunters gives students “a first glimpse of what research is, with all that goes with it: determination, grit, inspiration, frustration, and more,” says Ivan Erill, professor of biological sciences and co-instructor for the bioinformatics course with Caruso. “Students get to see all the possible outcomes of a research project, from total success culminating in a DNA extraction for sequencing to failure to isolate a phage in the first place.”

In the basement of the Meyerhoff Chemistry Building, in a tiled expanse called the Molecular Characterization and Analysis Complex, sits a sleek, roughly human-sized instrument with the power to measure extremely tiny amounts of chemicals. Amanda Belunis, a chemistry Ph.D. student now in her final year, knows the instrument like an old friend, having turned to it to analyze a smorgasbord of UMBC water samples.

Belunis studies a group of chemicals called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. The chemicals are used in products as varied as makeup, clothing, and fire-fighting foam and are found in trace amounts in many water sources as well as in human blood. Dubbed “forever chemicals” because of the way they persist in the environment, they present a growing concern to human health. 

Belunis’s research is part of a growing effort by scientists to understand how PFAS enter and travel through the environment and, ultimately, figure out ways to remove them.

To validate her procedures for measuring PFAS concentrations, Belunis tested water from drinking fountains, the sink in her chemistry lab, the pool, and the pond and streams around UMBC, all of which contained trace amounts of PFAS, as would be expected. Confident her methods worked on real-life samples, she then turned her attention to analyzing water in aquaculture fish tanks.

“My lab mates and I sometimes discuss how all of us have these chemicals in our bodies,” says Belunis. “It’s concerning, which is why we need to do more studies.” 

Amanda Belunis prepares samples for later analysis in the Molecular Characterization and Analysis Complex. Photo by Catherine Meyers.

When asked how to measure the height of a building, most students in Math in Action, a new laboratory course for non-STEM majors, “came up with various ways to measure the height directly—for example, by dropping down a string and then measuring the string or stacking up various objects,” says Alexis O’Malley ’18, mathematics and psychology, who teaches the lab. 

But today, students are peering along the edges of homemade clinometers—plastic protractors with drinking straws attached—taking measurements from safely on the ground with a meter stick, and running simple calculations based on the properties of triangles to measure the height of UMBC’s Administration Building (123 feet, 2 inches). 

Throughout the course, “I want students to see how math can be used to solve problems creatively,” O’Malley says.

Math in Action covers different math concepts each week through hands-on activities. The purpose of the clinometer activity is to remind students that “science is based on measurement, and you can build a tool to measure almost anything,” shares William R. LaCourse, dean of the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences, who originally generated the idea for the course to help a wider range of students develop math skills relevant to their everyday lives. The course, he adds, “is a doorway to a lot of different math concepts.” 

Shawn Abraham ’24, political science, has gotten lost on the UMBC campus more times than he can remember. As a blind student, he finds his way using a white cane, auditory cues, mental maps, and by asking people for directions. “People are surprised when I tell them, but big cities are much easier to navigate,” Abraham says. “College campuses are hard to get around.”

Tactile maps are one tool that could help. Erin Higgins and Kirk Crawford, Ph.D. students in human-centered computing, have recently been working with blind students at UMBC to create and test 3D-printed maps of campus. 

The researchers launched the project after being approached by Michael Canale, assistant director of the Office of Student Disability Services. He says UMBC currently has four completely blind students enrolled and his office wants to provide personalized maps that each student can carry with them as they navigate campus. He’d also like to see a large 3D-printed map mounted somewhere on campus.

“A beautiful tactile map could be used by visitors of all kinds,” Canale said. “It’s the principle of universal design.”

Meanwhile, Md Osman Gani, an assistant professor of information systems, is spearheading a new project, named MyPath, to develop a Google Maps–style app to help wheelchair users navigate campus. 

“Uneven surfaces, discontinuous sidewalks, and steep slopes can make wheelchair travel challenging, and even impossible” Gani says. The MyPath app would help by providing users with personalized turn-by-turn navigation with real-time updates. The app will rely on a machine learning model that recognizes path accessibility conditions based on crowd-sourced data, and Gani is currently recruiting wheelchair users to contribute data using their smartphones.

Shawn Abraham (left) tests prototype tactile maps made with 3-D printers with Michael Canale (right).

It’s 7 a.m. in July, and Megan Curtiss ’23, GES, is standing next to a tree just outside The Loop on UMBC’s southeast corner. It’s wrapped in a thin metal band at about chest height. Curtiss carefully measures the small gap between the two ends of the band with digital calipers three times, takes the average, and then moves on to the next tree. Only 98 to go.

This scene played out weekly from March to October 2023 as Curtiss collected data for a study led by Matthew Baker, GES professor, and Nancy Sonti, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service. “It became like a morning meditation,” Curtiss shares.

The metal bands, call dendrobands, “are a cheap and easy way to get pretty detailed information,” Curtiss says. By measuring the trees’ growth over time, the goal is to look at how trees of different species and in different immediate environments (such as a parking lot versus a forest) handle conditions like fluctuating temperatures and water availability. 

After attending Anne Arundel Community College in her 30s, Curtiss then found a home at UMBC. She began working with Baker in fall 2022 and will enter the GES master’s program at UMBC this fall. A graduate degree was not something Curtiss originally planned on, but now she’s excited about the further experiences it will bring. “I’m looking forward to the unexpected,” Curtiss says. 

Take a left off Hilltop Circle, just past the greenhouse on the right and toward the Walker Avenue apartments, and you’ll find yourself outside a traditional brick building that used to house trial rooms and detention cells. In 2021, UMBC turned this former courthouse into the main hub for the Center for Real-time Distributed Sensing and Autonomy (CARDS). Researchers here develop artificial intelligence-enabled smart robots for military and search-and-rescue operations.

On a sunny day in spring, you will likely see students gathered in the courthouse’s “backyard,” huddled around dog-like Spot robots and wheeled vehicles called Jackals and Huskies.

The researchers outfit the robots with a host of custom devices, such as cameras and radar to sense their surroundings and microprocessors to run on-board algorithms. While the robots can be commanded via voice and gesture, the ultimate goal is for them to operate mostly autonomously. 

Recently, the team has demonstrated this capability by verbally assigning the robots the task of jointly surveying a given area. The robots must translate the instructions from plain English into machine-level commands, divide up duties, detect and avoid obstacles, come to a fellow robot’s aid in the case of unexpected problems, and identify and keep track of the objects and people within their assigned perimeter.

“People from around campus will see us testing and will stop to watch,” says Aryya Gangopadhyay, a professor in information systems who directs CARDS. “The robots are an attention getter.” 

Erin Hamner collected weekly water quality data from this stream for six months, using the battery-powered digital probe she’s holding. (Image by Sarah L. Hansen, M.S. ’15)

After traipsing across a swampy field between research sites, Erin Hamner ’22, GES, and a current master’s student in the Interdisciplinary Consortium for Applied Research in the Environment program, scampers down a streambank in thigh-high waders and plunges a battery-powered probe into the water. It reports concentrations of ammonia and nitrates—key water quality measures. The probe also measures the water’s conductivity, which indicates the level of ions, such as salts used to melt snow. 

It’s beautiful out today, but Hamner completed the trek to a dozen campus sites weekly from September 2023 to February 2024, sometimes dealing with mud, snow, or rain. The goal of her master’s thesis is to confirm that stormwater management features UMBC has installed to reduce flooding, filter storm runoff, and otherwise improve water quality are working as intended—or if they aren’t, to suggest improvements.

Hamner and her collaborators in Facilities Management and the Office of Sustainability want to see the data collection effort continue after she graduates. So she is working with faculty in GES to incorporate crowd-sourced stormwater monitoring into the undergraduate curriculum, including generating a public dashboard.

“Erin has done incredible groundwork collecting water quality data across our campus, generating useful data that can tell us about the health of UMBC’s waterways,” says Taylor Smith, assistant director of sustainability. 

Long-term data will help the university “see how our development affects our watershed so we can continue to be good stewards,” Smith adds, noting that, “data like Erin’s can help us advocate for more greenspace and stream buffers around campus.”

Meet Aiman Raza ’22, biological sciences, and a current biological sciences master’s student in the Interdisciplinary Consortium for Applied Research in the Environment (ICARE) program. After studying at UMBC as an undergraduate, Aiman is thrilled to continue her graduate journey at UMBC studying brook trout using environmental DNA (eDNA). She says building connections in her cohort has helped enrich her academic experience and see the importance of interdisciplinary collaborations in environmental work. 

Q: What’s the one thing you’d want someone who hasn’t joined the UMBC community to know about it?

A: The diversity of the UMBC community is one of the biggest strengths of this institution. No matter your background or interests, there is always a space for you to grow and thrive at UMBC. 

Q: Tell us about someone in the community who has inspired you or supported you.

A: My faculty advisor, Tamra Mendelson, professor of biological sciences, has inspired and supported me throughout my academic journey. I first met Tamra when I was a freshman, and her passion for her research left such an impression on me that I decided to join her lab three years later as a graduate student. 

Q: Tell us about what you love about your academic program.

A: The ICARE program is making incredible strides in bridging the gap between research and environmental justice around Baltimore. With an interdisciplinary network of scientists and community leaders, ICARE is fulfilling its dual mission of increasing the diversity of the environmental workforce and conducting community-engaged research in and around Baltimore. 

Q: What led you to pursue graduate education at UMBC? 

A: I came back to UMBC as a master’s student because I was drawn to the ICARE program’s mission. I am passionate about conducting applied research with practical implications for my community. As an undergrad, I was involved with research in the biology department and heard about the ICARE program through my mentor. I knew that graduate school was the next step in pursuing a career in applied research, and the ICARE program’s goals aligned well with mine. I wanted to learn and grow in a program that brought diverse perspectives and focused on environmental justice in addressing environmental issues. 

Q: How has being part of a cohort-based program influenced your experience? 

A: The ICARE program has cultivated a community of professionals who care deeply about building a more just and equitable future for all. Every day, I get to learn from my cohort members, who come from various backgrounds and disciplines. Their unique research projects and diverse perspectives have helped me realize the importance of interdisciplinary collaborations in environmental work. Building close connections with my cohort has enriched my graduate school experience both professionally and personally. I am constantly inspired by their passion and look forward to seeing the great work we accomplish in the future. 

UMBC’s Interdisciplinary Consortium for Applied Research in the Environment (ICARE) program, a cohort-based master’s program focused on local environmental research, held its first annual ICARE CoNavigator Day on Friday, February 23, in the University Center Ballroom. The all-day event consisted of research planning activities for ICARE trainees, poster sessions highlighting the trainees’ research, and a keynote address given by Jalonne White-Newsome, senior director for environmental justice in the White House Council for Environmental Quality. The Maryland deputy and assistant secretaries of the environment and representatives from the League of Conservation Voters also attended.

“ICARE is a unique training model in which master’s students in the environmental sciences and engineering are co-mentored by UMBC faculty mentors, professional scientists or engineers, and community leaders. This day brought together all the trainees and their mentors to conceptualize their research through CoNavigator and present their research in well-attended poster sessions,” shares Tamra Mendelson, ICARE director and professor of biological sciences. 

CoNavigator is a unique three-dimensional concept mapping protocol the ICARE trainees and their thesis committees used to brainstorm. The structured format encouraged creative thinking about their projects’ goals and implementation.

Danish researchers created CoNavigator in 2015, and “UMBC was a big part of the genesis of this,” shared Katrine Lindvig, one of CoNavigator’s founders who facilitated the ICARE session. UMBC was one of the first institutions to apply the unique protocol, Lindvig said.

White-Newsome said in her keynote that addressing environmental problems “takes multiple perspectives; it takes creativity; it takes ensuring that those folks who are most impacted are part of and given the space to implement and co-solve and create solutions that will benefit us all.” 

She also encouraged the ICARE trainees: “To read about the questions you’re asking, and the way you’re going about answering them— your work is so important.”

Learn more about ICARE.