UMBC’s Center for Social Science Scholarship has opened its doors this fall with Christine Mallinson, professor of language, literacy, and culture, as its inaugural director. The new center, which will promote faculty, student, and alumni research across multiple fields of study, is the result of many years of cultivating deep levels of scholarship on campus as well as collaboration and planning by the social science faculty.

“The Center for Social Science Scholarship answers a longstanding need at UMBC: to provide a hub, a connector, and a microphone for our extraordinary work on critical issues facing communities and societies today,” explains Scott Casper, dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (CAHSS).

The center will emphasize areas of research such as civic and political participation, global patterns of labor and migration, educational access, the relationship between humans and the environment, human behavior and health equity across the lifespan, the social context of technology, and policy impact.

Mallinson, who joined UMBC in 2006, researches the context of and mechanisms involved in communication within major social institutions, including education, the workplace, and the legal system. By working with teachers, lawyers, and judges to better understand how perceptions cause bias, Mallinson has developed research-based strategies to remove inequalities and barriers.

“Christine Mallinson’s innovative, collaborative scholarship has influenced academic debates, informed policy, and empowered communities. I look forward to her leadership on behalf of UMBC’s social science research community,” says Casper.

Through her interdisciplinary work in language, literacy, and culture, Mallinson said she has immersed herself in multiple campus partnerships and experienced first-hand the extent of dynamic social science research happening across UMBC.

“What I am most excited for with the Center for Social Science Scholarship is the ability to spotlight the depth and breadth of the social science research that our faculty and students commit to on a daily basis,” says Mallinson.

As part of these efforts, current social science programming—such as the research-based events and assistance offered by the Maryland Institute for Public Policy and Research (MIPAR), and the Social Science Forum lecture series—will be housed in and managed by the Center for Social Science Scholarship. Located in the Public Policy building, the center will also serve as a partner in connecting and sharing key insights and perspectives of social science alumni and community partners.

Mallinson sees this collaborative work as a continuation of UMBC’s values and commitment to applied research. “This is an opportunity at a pivotal time in our country,” she says, “to tackle some of the big picture questions that are significant in the social sciences, but that also have applicability to other fields, are relevant across UMBC, and matter to our communities.”

Featured image: Christine Mallinson. All photos by Marlayna Demond ‘11 for UMBC

Building on 25 years of experience in public policy research, UMBC alumnus Chris Haffer has started a new leadership role with the key federal agency that enforces civil rights laws against discrimination in the workplace. Haffer, M.P.S. ‘91, public policy, and Ph.D. ‘93, public policy, is now the first chief data officer and director of the Office of Research, Information and Planning for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

“In this role, I have an opportunity to help foster innovation and creativity to proactively identify how we share data safely with the public and ensure the greatest impact and reach for the community,” says Haffer.

Haffer began his first year of college with a love of foreign languages, and he expected that would be his career. That was until a social sciences requirement introduced him to sociology.

The course sparked in him an interest in applied research, leading to a summer job as a research assistant at the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs. He continued on to UMBC’s master’s and Ph.D. public policy programs, and a career spanning over two decades at the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMMS).

For Haffer, UMBC offered an important bridge between public policy theory and practice. Professors emeriti Marvin Mandell and Donald F. Norris, public policy, shared their vast applied research experience through both their teaching and also connecting Haffer with opportunities in the Maryland Institute for Policy Analysis and Research. Both mentors also guided Haffer to the highly competitive Presidential Fellows Program that began his 25-year service at CMSS.

“I remember Chris as a smart, talented and driven graduate student who was passionate about public service,” says Norris. “I know him now as a friend and it has been no surprise to me that he has achieved so much and risen so highly in governmental service.”

Through Norris and Mandell’s examples, Haffer says, he saw how public policy could make a difference in people’s lives. “I learned that with applied public policy research I could turn research into action in a focused way to help programs and agencies better meet the needs of the community,” he shares.

His advice for anyone wanting to work with big data and in the federal service is to move beyond misconceptions. Haffer explains that big data is not only about analysis, nor is federal service solitary work.

“We need more creative minds to help tell a more engaging and accessible data story,” says Haffer. He encourages graphic designers, media and communications majors, and marketing graduates to consider federal service careers in data-focused areas.

The most rewarding aspect of big data and federal service for Haffer has been learning how to best use, disseminate, and implement data with the collaboration of interdisciplinary teams.

“When you are trying to solve a problem, you may be able to do it faster yourself,” reflects Haffer, “but the product a team creates is better because it represents the intersection of different views. It will be of more value to your customers, who will be as diverse as the team that created the product.”

Banner Image: Chris Haffer at the EEOC.  All photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

When Christy Ford Chapin, associate professor of history, began teaching at UMBC in 2012, she started by connecting curious students with the history of the American health care system. Her first book, Ensuring America’s Health, was an in-depth history of the country’s health care and health insurance system. This fall, as the recipient of a prestigious Kluge Fellowship, Chapin is immersed in the banking and finance collections at the U.S. Library of Congress, rather than in conversation with her students. While the archives are not quite as action-packed as the classroom, her enthusiasm for digging into the nitty gritty of U.S. history remains contagious.

Chapin loves how historians seek answers buried in documents, archives, museums, libraries, basements, attics and forgotten filing cabinets. “We have to be like private investigators. I have to beg, borrow, and plead to get documents,” says Chapin. “I was really intimidated by the research aspect early on in my graduate career, but then I fell in love with the hunt for primary sources and the process of putting together pieces of the evidence puzzle.”

Through her current Kluge Fellowship, as well as an inaugural fellowship last spring at the Ed Snider Center for the History of Capitalism at the University of Maryland, Chapin examines how the United States shifted from an industrial manufacturing economy to a financial economy for a new book on post-WWII finance. She’s energized by seeing several of her history colleagues pursue other high impact research areas through fellowships around the globe in what has been a particularly exciting year of achievement for the department’s faculty.

While in Beijing researching her first book in 2011, Meredith Oyen, associate professor, came across documents that discussed cooperation between the People’s Republic of China and the UN-affiliated International Refugee Organization well into the 1950s, when the PRC was not recognized by the UN. They dealt in part with the resettlement of Jewish and European refugees in China after WWII.

The documents reflected a great mystery. I asked myself, ‘Why did this organization stay in China all these years?’  I had to search other archives to start to figure it out.” Oyen was determined to learn more and followed the paperwork trail to Shanghai, Taipei, London, and Washington D.C. where she held a U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Fellowship in 2016-17 that helped her find even more clues.

At the same time, Marjoleine Kars, associate professor and chair, and Kate Brown, professor, pursued Braudel Senior Fellowships at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. There, Kars worked on her book about one of the largest rebellions of enslaved people in Atlantic history, which occurred in 1763 in the South American Dutch colony of Berbice. Brown continued to expand her research on the lasting health and environmental impacts of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in new directions. 

Brown also received a highly prestigious Andrew Carnegie Fellowship to study the health effect of Chernobyl and a Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin.

Prior to Brown receiving the Berlin Prize, Professor Rebecca Boehling received the prestigious award in fall 2016 for her work on denazification in post-WWII Germany, comparing the approaches of the United States, Great Britain, and France.

Kars shares how these types of intensive research and international exchange opportunities have far-reaching benefits for the individual faculty members who experience them. “Faculty come back from research leave with new ideas about teaching, research projects, new directions for their own work, and they bring that energy into the classroom,” she says. “Our students benefit from reenergized faculty who are on the cutting edge of their profession and are able to connect them with research monies, fellowships, and graduate school mentors.”

In order to reach this level of success, Kars notes, history faculty have also depended on support from each other—in terms of sharing feedback, resources, and responsibilities—and from the broader university. She particularly credits a multi-tiered support system of seed funding—in the form of summer fellowships and research money from the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, The Maryland Institute for Policy Analysis and Research, and The Dresher Center for the Humanities—as well as the help of Rachel Brubaker, associate director of The Dresher Center, with writing and submitting grant applications.

“This kind of support has been invaluable to our faculty as they work to hone their research and explore new opportunities for growth,” says Kars. “When I think about what has made the difference in our successfully competing for such major national and international fellowships, one core aspect of UMBC comes to mind: our collaborative community of scholars. This is what makes it possible for us to explore unique research opportunities around the world, and what draws us back to UMBC each time, to share what we’ve learned.”

Banner image: Christy Ford Chapin presents at Hilltop First Talk. Photo Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

UMBC’s College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences is starting fall 2017 by welcoming new leaders for both the School of Public Policy and Maryland Institute of Policy Analysis and Research (MIPAR).

Susan Sterett, the new director of the School of Public Policy, comes to UMBC after serving three years as a professor in the Center for Public Administration and Policy and director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech. Prior to that, Sterett was the program director for law and social sciences at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and an associate dean for the University of Denver’s Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences academic unit. She is also currently co-chair of the Committee on the Status of Women in Political Science of the Western Political Science Association.

Sterett views higher education as having an essential role in American society today, and voices from the School of Public Policy as having great potential to impact national conversations on major issues.

“Universities can broaden our horizons and invite us to bring our inquiry to our communities,” she says, emphasizing, “UMBC’s proud tradition of excellence and public service are evident in the problems faculty and students in the School of Public Policy study, and the connection to communities that they bring.”

Sterett received her Ph.D. in jurisprudence and social policy from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research, teaching and writing focus on what people and institutions do with law and policy, particularly around social welfare issues. Her publications include the books Public Pensions: Gender and Civic Service in the States, 1850-1937 (Cornell University Press, 2003) and Creating Constitutionalism?: Professional Politics and Administrative Law in England and Wales (University of Michigan Press, 1997).

As director, Sterett says, “I plan to foster the success of current and incoming faculty, work to partner well across the social sciences, and deepen outreach to potential students, while supporting the School’s continued excellence in the policy areas of public management, health equity, environmental justice, and education equity.”

UMBC also celebrates Anne Brodsky‘s new appointment as interim director of MIPAR and special assistant to the dean for social sciences.

“I’m excited to join the wonderful MIPAR staff, help MIPAR continue its critical role in supporting public policy and the social sciences at UMBC, and explore next steps MIPAR can take to advance the cutting edge scholarship and community engagement being done in this area by our faculty, staff, and students,” she shares.

Brodsky received her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park in clinical and community psychology, and joined UMBC’s faculty in 1997. She is a professor of psychology and served as associate dean in UMBC’s College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences from 2012–2016.

In 2016-17 Brodsky participated in the prestigious American Council on Education (ACE) fellows program. She was one of just 29 fellows from across the nation to participate that year, selected for their tremendous potential as leaders in higher education. Upon the announcement of her ACE fellowship, she shared, “I am particularly interested in issues of access, inclusion, participation, and retention at all levels of the university, as well as initiatives to promote the co-equal synergy of STEM, the social sciences, and all the liberal arts – a synergy that is necessary to contribute to changes in the real world that serve to enhance the university’s value to the community.”

Brodsky is a community/clinical psychologist whose teaching, research, and practice focus on individual and community resilience in relation to violence, poverty, racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression. She has worked with both immigrant and nonimmigrant communities in the Baltimore-Washington D.C. area, particularly with single, low-income mothers. She has also traveled extensively throughout Pakistan and Afghanistan for research, and works in the U.S. to raise awareness of the experiences of Afghan women. She is the author of With All Our Strength: The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (Routledge, 2004).

Don Norris, who served as director of MIPAR for 28 years and as director of public policy for ten years, including the transition of UMBC’s public policy programs from a department to a school, will now transition to an emeritus role. He notes that he looks forward to the vision and skill sets Sterett and Brodsky will bring to their new positions, reflecting, “After my 28 years at UMBC, I leave with excitement about the new directions and contributions that Susan Sterrett and Anne Brodsky bring to the School and MIPAR.”

Dean Scott Casper of UMBC’s College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences shares in this excitement, commenting, “Susan Sterett brings to the School of Public Policy an impressive range of academic and administrative experience, including her important work at the NSF. Anne Brodsky’s contributions to UMBC and to community psychology are legion, and her ACE fellowship has deepened her already national field of vision. I look forward to their leadership in thinking expansively about and across the social sciences at UMBC.”

Banner image: Susan Sterett, the new director of the School of Public Policy. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Tyson King-Meadows, chair of Africana studies and associate professor of political science, has been appointed associate dean of UMBC’s College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CAHSS), beginning in summer 2016.

King-Meadows joined UMBC in 2003 and has held numerous leadership positions across campus. He’s an affiliate faculty member of the School of Public Policy and the Maryland Institute for Policy Analysis and Research. Most recently, he served on the Strategic Planning Steering Committee and the Collective Impact in Research, Scholarship & Creative Achievement Strategy Group.

Prof. King-Meadows co-chairs the Executive Committee for the Recruitment, Retention and Advancement of Underrepresented Minority Faculty and has been instrumental in developing initiatives, polices, and procedures to enhance UMBC’s success at recruiting and retaining under-represented minority faculty. Among several other multi-university initiatives, he has served or currently serves as chair of the Honors College Advisory Board, chair of the CAHSS Black Faculty Committee, and member of the Shriver Center Faculty Advisory Board. King-Meadows brings a wealth of experience shepherding experiential learning initiatives and programs designed to enhance college equity and access.

He earned his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has received external funding from various agencies and foundations, including the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has served as a Fulbright Scholar, as president of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists, and as a research fellow at Harvard University, Princeton University, and Johns Hopkins University.

A highly regarded teacher and scholar, King-Meadows has mentored a number of dynamic undergraduate research assistants, published innovative scholarship, and has been a research associate for the Joint Center for Economic and Political Studies and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.

In 2012, he received the American Political Science Association Congressional Fellowship, the discipline’s most prestigious fellowship award designed to expand knowledge and awareness of Congress, and worked as a full-time staffer for the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on the Judiciary. His book on enforcement of the Voting Rights Act has garnered critical acclaim from journalists, activists, scholars, and legislators. His current projects examine the impact of racial imagery and racial attitudes on public support for federal policies designed to ameliorate political and economic inequality.

“Tyson King-Meadows is already a leader in teaching, scholarship, and service to the university and the community. I look forward to his expanded role in supporting the missions of the college and UMBC,” shares Scott Casper, dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences.

Read more about Tyson King-Meadow’s research on the Africana studies website and a recent profile in UMBC Magazine.

Photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC. 

An article published January 8th in The Gazette examines the impact of the Maryland Dream Act after its first year. The law allows undocumented immigrants who graduate from Maryland high schools and meet certain conditions to pay in-state and in-county tuition at Maryland public community colleges and public universities.

The article, titled “The First Year of ‘Dreamers,'” references UMBC’s Maryland Institute for Policy Analysis and Research study on the economic impact of the Dream Act. The report concluded the Dream Act would benefit state and local governments with $6.2 million in economic activity.

The article mentions opponents’ claims that the Dream Act would reduce the number of openings available at public institutions, but UMBC’s study refutes that claim, stating that “additional undocumented immigrant students admitted to Maryland public community colleges — which have open enrollment — will have no impact on the probability that other students will or will not be admitted. It also stated that the Dream Act will not hurt the number of citizens admitted as freshmen to a four-year public university.”

The study is also mentioned when analyzing costs of the program for additional schooling on a per-student basis, “but such costs will be more than offset by increased tax dollars, as well as a drop in spending on incarceration and other social programs that is expected to accompany a more educated population, according to the study.”

You can read the full article in The Gazette here.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has awarded a 3-year, $750,000 grant the Maryland Institute for Policy Analysis and Research (MIPAR), The Hilltop Institute at UMBC, and the Green and Healthy Homes Initiative (GHHI) to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of the reduction in asthma and associated Medicated expenditures resulting from the implementation of GHHI interventions.

GHHI is a national program spearheaded by the Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning. GHHI integrates health-based housing interventions with weatherization to create access to healthy homes for children in low-income neighborhoods.

The UMBC study will focus on GHHI interventions in the homes of low-income families with asthma-diagnosed children in Baltimore City. The project will evaluate the extent to which GHHI interventions impact asthma morbidity and health care utilization costs, school absences, utility costs and work-loss days for parents or caregivers of children with asthma. The study will also examine how different levels of GHHI interventions impact post-intervention resident health and overall non-medical and energy cost savings.

The interdisciplinary research team includes principal investigator David Salkever, public policy/MIPAR; co-investigator Michael Abrams, Hilltop; researchers from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health; and co-principal investigator Ruth Ann Norton, executive director of the Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning/GHHI.

Their study concludes, “the Dream Act would generate $66 million in economic activity for each incoming new class of undocumented students.” See the website of UMBC’s Maryland Institute for Policy Analysis and Research (MIPAR) for the original working paper: “Private and Government Fiscal Costs and Benefits of the Maryland Dream Act.”

NPR’s political news site and Inside Higher Ed link directly to the study itself. Other media referencing Gindling and Mandell’s findings include the Chronicle of Higher Education, Baltimore Sun, Gazette, Washington Times, Washington Examiner, Capital News Service and Delmarva Now.

Maryland voters will soon decide whether to allow undocumented immigrants who graduate from Maryland high schools and meet other requirements to pay in-county/in-state tuition at local community colleges and public universities. A recent study on the Dream Act’s economic impacts by UMBC professors T.H. Gindling (economics) and Marvin Mandell (public policy) has received significant media attention and today appeared on TIME magazine‘s online coverage of the referendum.

TIME notes that Gindling and Mandell’s study concludes, “the Dream Act would generate $66 million in economic activity for each incoming new class of undocumented students.” See the website of UMBC’s Maryland Institute for Policy Analysis and Research (MIPAR) for the original working paper: “Private and Government Fiscal Costs and Benefits of the Maryland Dream Act.”

In one month Maryland voters will decide whether to allow undocumented immigrants who graduate from Maryland high schools and meet other requirements to pay in-county/in-state tuition at local community colleges and public universities. Until now, voters had little information to go on about the Dream Act’s likely effects, but a new report from UMBC professors T.H. Gindling (economics) and Marvin Mandell (public policy) offers hard data on its economic impacts.

“Private and Government Fiscal Costs and Benefits of the Maryland Dream Act” is a working paper funded by the Maryland Institute for Policy Analysis and Research (MIPAR) at UMBC. The conclusion: For each annual cohort of students who utilize the Dream Act, total net benefits to the economy are approximately $66 million.

The Baltimore Sun heralded the study’s detailed analysis and concluded: “The emotional, philosophical and moral debates stirred by the referendum on this issue are certainly important. But on a practical level, there is no question: The Dream Act is good for Maryland.” The Washington Post and WYPR’s Maryland Morning featured additional comments from researchers Gindling and Mandell.

Access the full working paper and a policy brief summarizing the study at umbc.edu/mipar.

Update (10/16/2012): Additional coverage has appeared in the Gazette, Daily Record Baltimore Sun, Washington Post, DC Examiner, Westminster Patch and Lutherville-Timonium Patch. WYPR’s Inside Maryland Politics, Immigration Impact, Capital News Service (1, 2), ABC2News and WBAL and have also reported on this study.