UMBC’s new Make Your Research Come Alive (MyRCA) program is helping faculty translate their scholarship into compelling stories that resonate across disciplines, sectors, and audiences. Launched in November 2025, the program wrapped up its inaugural cohort with a May showcase.

“We created the MyRCA program to help faculty strengthen their research communication skills and effectively convey the significance and real-world impact of their work beyond traditional academic audiences and funding pathways,” says Christine Mallinson, assistant vice president for research and scholarly impact. “It also encourages faculty to think strategically and creatively about visibility, partnerships, collaboration, and long-term impact,” she adds.

Led by the Division of Research and Creative Achievement in partnership with the Office of Institutional Advancement, MyRCA brought together 14 faculty members for twice-monthly workshops and working group sessions, a January mini-retreat, and the culminating showcase. The program focused on identifying and articulating research impact, translating specialized scholarship for broad audiences, developing compelling narratives and pitches, understanding funding landscapes, exploring pathways for engagement with corporate, community, and philanthropic partners, and strengthening interdisciplinary collaboration.

“The value of this program is in connecting with each other,” cohort member Foad Hamidi, associate professor of information systems, shared at the showcase. “Strong research communication and collaboration can help our research come alive,” adds Dong Li, another cohort member and assistant professor of computer science and electrical engineering. Li added, “We are not just researchers, we are telling our story to our audience.”

The value of connection

The program intentionally grouped faculty into smaller interdisciplinary teams organized around broad themes such as health, youth, and the environment. These connections quickly sparked new ideas and collaborations.

For instance, Lauren Clay, professor and chair of emergency and disaster health systems, connected with Li, after learning about his work on wearable health-monitoring devices. Clay wondered how Li’s technology could support a colleague’s research on paramedic response during extreme heat events, including monitoring heat stroke risks for marathon runners.

A group including Gabriella Weiss, postdoctoral researcher with the Center for Spaces Sciences and Technology; Marie-Christine Daniel, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry; and Sophie Comer-Warner, assistant professor of geography and environmental systems, examined remediation strategies for microplastics, heavy metals, and volatile organic compounds with a focus on wetlands. Their collaboration pointed to promising local funding opportunities with Maryland Sea Grant and Chesapeake Bay organizations.

Ellen Kohl, assistant professor of geography and environmental systems, strengthened a new science communication course with the skills she gained, and Shuling Yang, assistant professor of education, advanced her research using generative AI and Chinese pop music for biliteracy development. Brian Kaufman, professor of music, built on the UMBC Create Music Festival, which brings collaborative problem-solving into a typically performance-based discipline. 

By the showcase, participants had developed polished pitches, public-facing materials, and broader impact narratives ready for funding proposals, donor outreach, and the media. Each received $500 in research support, along with new cross-campus and external connections.

MyRCA stretches faculty beyond their comfort zones

Mallinson has been excited to see the 14 faculty “stretch beyond their usual disciplinary comfort zones and immediately begin putting the skills and approaches they were learning into practice—developing cross-disciplinary proposals, crafting pitches, appearing in videos and podcasts, participating in panels, and bringing what they learned in the program back to their graduate students and colleagues.” 

Linda Kidder Yarlott, associate director for corporate research partnerships, highlighted the value of the partnership between the Division of Research and Creative Achievement and the Office of Institutional Advancement. “While federal funding agencies are looking for highly technical, methodology-driven proposals, it’s visionary, outcome-oriented narratives that clearly articulate the human impact and real-world return on investment that entice corporate and philanthropic partners,” Yarlott says.

Yarlott and Jocelyn Kehl, major gift officer for the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences, worked with the cohort on practical skills—from strategic networking and optimizing LinkedIn profiles to crafting stories that resonate with donors and foundations. “Mentoring this cohort has been an incredibly rewarding experience, culminating in a spectacular program showcase where faculty teams powerfully demonstrated new communication skills that will help unlock new philanthropic pathways,” Yarlott shares. 

For more information and to learn about the full 2025 – 2026 cohort, visit research.umbc.edu/myrca.

For over 500 days, the Hyper-Angular Rainbow Polarimeter 2 (HARP2), a high-tech instrument built by UMBC researchers and students, has been orbiting Earth on NASA’s Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) satellite, capturing stunning data about our planet’s atmosphere, surface, and oceans. UMBC celebrated this milestone with lab tours, a poster session showcasing student research, and talks from the PACE instrument and science teams and university leadership, highlighting the instrument’s success and the hands-on role students play in this NASA mission.

“There is palpable pride on our campus in UMBC’s contributions to the PACE mission,” shares Karl V. Steiner, vice president for research and creative achievement. “Because much of the HARP2 instrument was created with strong involvement from both undergraduate and graduate students, this mission truly combines the best of our research and education missions. HARP2 is clearly a milestone in our 30-plus year partnership with NASA Goddard.’’   

HARP2’s story builds on UMBC’s earlier work with the original HARP, a pint-sized CubeSat launched in 2019 that earned the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ SmallSat Mission of the Year award in 2021. That tiny satellite showed the world how capturing data from many angles could reveal a more complete picture of the atmospheric composition, including the roles of clouds, dust, and smoke. 

HARP2, launched in February 2024, takes HARP’s work further, collecting detailed data from a survey of the entire globe every two days. HARP2 collects in half a day the same amount of data collected by HARP in its entire two-year flight. Researchers have also enhanced data analysis methods, allowing scientists to glean even more accurate and detailed information from the raw data transmitted from space. Alongside PACE’s Ocean Color Instrument (OCI), HARP2 is helping scientists study everything from air quality to climate patterns, and painting a fuller picture of Earth’s systems.

What sets HARP2 apart is its ability to see the atmosphere in 3D-like detail, thanks to its unique “hyper-angular” views. “The instrument is working, it’s producing great data, and the community is starting to use it,” shares Vanderlei Martins, director of the Earth and Space Institute (ESI) at UMBC and the HARP team lead. Scientists across the U.S. and beyond are tapping into HARP2’s data to track pollution, measure cloud droplet properties, and more. Unlike other satellites, HARP2 can distinguish whether particles in the air are smoke, dust, or pollution, offering clues that help us understand air quality and climate impacts.

To ground-truth the data coming from HARP2, some members of the team traveled to Bolivia. They flew drones over high-altitude Lake Titicaca and the Salar de Uyuni salt flat to collect data that complements HARP2’s space-based views. With less atmosphere above them, these sites offer a clearer match to satellite observations, helping refine the science.

An “explosion” of science

Students at UMBC are deeply involved, from building and calibrating HARP2 to digging into its data. Graduate students in the atmospheric physics program work closely with faculty and NASA engineers, even on the most sensitive elements of the project. 

During testing for HARP2, “I was given the opportunity not only to see the initial calibration process, but then to see the team respond to a catastrophic failure, and then come back from it,” recalls Rachel Smith, an atmospheric physics Ph.D. student. “To watch them come together in support of the project and not miss a beat putting it back together was really incredible to see.” Early in her time with the group, Smith got to hold the instrument. “It’s a cool feeling, that I picked up and worked on this thing that’s now in space,” she says.  

Nirandi Jayasinghe, another atmospheric physics Ph.D. student, recalls the earliest data coming in. “We were all here—graduate students, scientists, and engineers—in this very room, doing stuff piece by piece to visualize ‘first light’ from HARP2,” she says. “I don’t think I’ve seen this much synergy between people anywhere else.”

Over time, the team has grown to meet the rising demands of the project. “I’ve seen how the group has gone from just me, Dominik [Cieslak], Roberto [Borda], and a couple of other engineers to now three, four, five grad students at once tackling different and interesting science questions,” shares Brent McBride ’14, physics, Ph.D. ’22, atmospheric physics, who today is an instrument scientist with the ESI. “It’s been an explosion of not only the capacity of the group, but the science that we’re capable of doing.” 

“There’s huge power there”

“Because of its hyper-angular capability, there are things we can see with HARP2 that we have never seen before,” Martins explains. This includes new insights into cloud properties and aerosol types, which are critical for understanding climate and pollution. HARP2 also helps OCI see past atmospheric haze, boosting studies over land and water. 

HARP2 has been rock-steady since launch, with no major issues. It even uses the moon for monthly calibration checks to keep its data sharp. Designed for at least three years but with fuel for potentially a decade, it’s poised to keep delivering. The data is freely available, sparking discoveries worldwide. 

“HARP2 is helping us monitor and understand Earth’s systems and come up with ways to improve life,” Martins says.“We can study everything from fires to red tides and even floods, all the way from natural disasters to the effect of pollution on nature in general. There’s huge power there.” 

As the team celebrates HARP2’s more than 500 days in orbit, its steady stream of data continues to fuel discoveries that deepen our understanding of Earth’s atmosphere and oceans. From its roots as a small CubeSat to its role in NASA’s PACE mission, UMBC’s HARP2 showcases the power of collaboration among students, scientists, and NASA, driving science that informs everything from air quality forecasts to climate solutions. With years of potential ahead, HARP2’s impact is only beginning to unfold, inspiring new questions and innovations from UMBC’s campus to the global scientific community.

Vast, quasi-circular features on Venus’ surface may reveal that the planet has ongoing tectonics, according to new research. On Earth, the shifting and recycling of tectonic plates continually renews our planet’s surface. Venus doesn’t have tectonic plates, but its surface is still being deformed by molten material from below. 

“These features are not found on Earth today; however, they may have existed when our planet was young and before plate tectonics had been established,” says the study’s lead author, Gael Cascioli, a UMBC assistant research scientist with the Center for Space Sciences and Technology. “By combining gravity and topography data, this research has provided a new and important insight into the possible subsurface processes currently shaping the surface of Venus.” 

Seeking to better understand the underlying processes at work on Venus, researchers studied a feature called a corona. Ranging from tens to hundreds of miles across, a corona is most often thought to be the location where a blob of molten, buoyant material from the planet’s mantle rises (called a “plume”), pushing against the uppermost part of the planet’s mantle and its crust. Coronae are usually oval and surrounded by fractures in the crust, and hundreds are known to exist on Venus. 

Old data, new discoveries

The new study, published in Science Advances, found telltale signs of corona-shaping activity at or beneath Venus’ surface. These signs may also provide a unique window into Earth’s past. To find them, the authors turned to NASA’s Magellan mission, which orbited Venus in the 1990s and collected what is still the most detailed gravity and topography data of Venus available. 

There are various theories about how coronae form. “The most exciting thing for our study is that we can now say there are most likely various and ongoing active processes driving their formation,” coauthor Anna Gülcher, Earth and planetary scientist at the University of Bern in Switzerland, says. 

The scientists created detailed 3D models that predicted different ways the coronae might have formed, and then compared them to data from Magellan. Their work revealed that beneath about 70 percent of the coronae they studied, there were hot, low-density plumes rising from deep inside Venus, which might be causing the unique geological activity. 

The NASA VERITAS mission, scheduled for launch no earlier than 2031, will be key to filling gaps in understanding of how coronae form. According to coauthor Suzanne Smrekar, planetary scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and principal investigator for VERITAS, the mission will provide much greater resolution than Magellan, supplying “an unprecedented level of detail that could revolutionize our understanding of Venus’ geology and implications for early Earth.” 

Read the complete NASA release here.

By Anne Wainscott-Sargent

The third time’s the charm. Against a calm and crisp dark night sky on Florida’s Cape Canaveral last Thursday, February 8, just after 1:30 a.m., the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, Ocean Ecosystem (PACE) spacecraft rocketed to orbit carrying on board Hyper-Angular Rainbow Polarimeter (HARP2)―UMBC’s wide-angle imaging polarimeter.  The launch marked the first time NASA deployed a university payload on a large operational Earth science space mission.

Following two scrubbed night launches on Tuesday and Wednesday due to strong winds, Thursday’s successful takeoff was well worth the wait for the core team of UMBC Earth and Space Institute researchers, graduate students, and their family and friends who journeyed from Baltimore to watch the historic launch.

Arriving by bus a little before midnight to the Banana Creek Launch Viewing Area at Kennedy Space Center, just over six miles from Space Launch Complex-40, the close-knit UMBC entourage huddled together waiting for the final countdown.

When it came, they—along with hundreds of other space launch watchers—held their breath and then yelled and clapped as SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket blasted off and propelled PACE 400 miles above Earth into sun-synchronous orbit. Minutes later the Falcon 9’s first stage—SpaceX’s reusable rocket booster—successfully landed at Landing Zone 1. The crowd gasped audibly at the sonic boom, caused when the spacecraft broke the sound barrier.

“It still doesn’t quite feel real,” said Noah Christian Sienkiewicz, a calibration scientist who earned his master’s degree in atmospheric physics from UMBC in 2019 and expects to complete his physics doctorate this summer. “I grew up watching Carl Sagan and dreamed of going into astrophysics. I never thought I’d be the person making the instruments that will go up and do the measurements.”

“It’s so exciting—I’m going to cry,” uttered Margo Young from the upper bleacher. “I don’t always see the pieces and parts put together, so this is really historic.” 

Young serves as UMBC’s HARP program administrator, where she has overseen procurement and other back-end support for HARP since the program’s inception in 2013. “I get to see students come full circle—working in the lab and then graduating and becoming civil servants where they continue to be involved because it’s such an amazing project,” she explained.     

On the path to PACE

The UMBC HARP team’s remarkable journey from idea to mission reality spanned over 15 years, and involved countless hours of design, modeling, testing, and validation. Earlier iterations of HARP flew first on private aircraft over the Maryland countryside and then an award-winning “cubesat” version launched into orbit from the International Space Station (ISS), all stepping stones on the path to PACE.

For the three multidisciplinary HARP2 physics, optics, and research engineering leads, Vanderlei Martins, Roberto Borda, and Dominik Cieslak, HARP2’s launch represents a career-defining moment that at times seemed against all odds for a mid-size public university. UMBC’s strong partnerships with NASA, such as the Goddard Earth Science Technology and Research (GESTAR) Center II that supports Borda’s and Cieslak’s roles, help enable milestones like this.  

“I feel like I’m still dreaming,” said a visibly emotional Cieslak, research engineer, who captured the launch on his long-range camera. 

Transfixed by the sight of live satellite footage of the PACE spacecraft heading to orbit, he added, “This is the last time we will physically see it [HARP2],” before hugging his long-time colleague, Borda. 

“We’re very proud to have UMBC in space,” added Martins, professor of physics, who watched the big moment from a VIP viewing area three miles from the launch site. “We dreamed big from the beginning. The team persevered and just kept going.” 

“I never despaired of having HARP2 on the PACE satellite,” admitted UMBC’s HARP2 manager, Lorraine Remer, research professor in the Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology. Her bigger worry wasn’t HARP2’s viability, but whether PACE would ever launch. “PACE was canceled four times and reinstated four times,” she recalled, noting that the program “survived a lengthy government shutdown and a global pandemic that destroyed our supply chains.” 

Immediately after launch, Remer had to return to Maryland and the Goddard Space Flight Center to oversee HARP2 being turned on within 36 hours of launch. “It would be nice to bask in the successful launch, but I haven’t had much time to contemplate the success. There is just more work to do all the time,” she said.

An international effort

NASA’s PACE mission clears the path for revolutionary new measurements of Earth’s oceans and atmosphere. HARP2 measures aerosol particles and clouds, as well as properties of land and water surfaces. By analyzing particles like dust, wildfire smoke, or urban pollution, the science community gains deeper insights into air quality as well as global warming and its impacts. Scientists will be able see through things like sun glint to ascertain patterns never before possible.

A second polarimeter on PACE, the Spectro-polarimeter for Planetary Exploration (SPEXone), developed through a Dutch consortium consisting of SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research and Airbus Defence and Space Netherlands, will measure sunlight reflected from Earth’s atmosphere, land surface and ocean.

These two companion polarimeter instruments are important because the interaction between aerosols and clouds is the biggest unknown factor in atmospheric temperature change, according to reports from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 

“I have watched Dr. Martins and his team work toward this moment for about a decade, and have been aware of the trials and tribulations along the way. Seeing the smiles on their faces in the control station after the launch made it all worthwhile,” shared UMBC Vice President for Research Karl V. Steiner. “The HARP2 mission as an integral part of PACE is making all of us proud here on the UMBC campus. We cannot wait to see the science that will come from this engineering masterpiece conceptualized and created right here in Maryland.”

Waiting game

In the days leading up to the PACE launch, the HARP2 team knew there might be delays because of the weather so they rented a large Airbnb in neighboring Cocoa Beach for the full week. Earlier in the week, over grilled food at the shared house, the team reflected on their journey.

According to Martins, a key strategy was bringing together engineering and physics students, who typically don’t communicate well across disciplines.  

“We introduced engineering students to the physics students and made them work together very quickly so they spoke the same language,” he said, crediting this multidisciplinary collaboration to the team’s ability to rapidly iterate and problem solve.

Borda, senior research engineer overseeing HARP2’s optical design, said a key technical challenge was determining how to best compensate for the effects of polarized light waves inside the instrument.

“It’s continuous work and you cannot do it alone. We needed a fantastic team with not only the staff but also students working at different levels,” Borda said. “There are undergraduate students and Ph.D.s integrated into the team who put in a lot of effort to make this real. We’re really thankful for the environment at this university—we’re able to work with students who find a career in this industry and field of research.”

Nurturing future career scientists

Martins echoed Borda’s pride in the broad level of participation in the HARP program, from high school students to senior scientists.

“We’ve had people from our team who now work in all levels of industry—at NASA, at NOAA, or in private industry. We’ve even had some students start their own company.”

Young, the program administrator, estimates that the cooperative agreements between UMBC and NASA have resulted in 20 UMBC graduates finding roles with NASA.

UMBC alumna Elissa Ogburn is one such graduate. She began working on HARP2 as a computer science major, tasked with creating a database that supported ground communications so researchers could communicate with the instrument when it was in space.

After graduating from UMBC in 2021, Ogburn joined NASA on the PACE project as a test conductor (TC)―responsible for integrating and testing the instruments onto the PACE spacecraft. During launch, she was one of five TCs in the PACE Control Room in Titusville, Florida, who powered up the spacecraft for the last time and configured it for launch. 

“I never imagined having a job at NASA or working with people who were this smart, helpful, and kind. Every single person I’ve worked with was so fun. It’s also cool to have seen the whole process beginning as a student at UMBC. PACE is my first mission, so I’m learning everything as I go,” Ogburn said.

Close collaboration

The partnership between NASA and UMBC goes back over two decades. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and UMBC are located just up the road from one another.

Jeremy Werdell, PACE project scientist at Goddard, recalled how initial calls to industry and academia for a polarimetry instrument for PACE were not promising due to cost and other factors.

However, Martins immediately suggested to Werdell that his lab develop a polarimeter, given his team’s experience with airborne instruments and the HARP cubesat, and the rest is history. In the end, NASA selected two polarimeters—HARP2 and SPEXone.

Each instrument measures polarization differently: HARP2 is multispectral (measuring only four wavelengths of light) and  hyperangular, so it looks at the same piece of real estate multiple times from dozens of different viewing directions. Its wide swath coverage means HARP2 will cover the globe every two days. SPEXone, on the other hand, is hyperspectral (measuring a continuous spectrum of light from the ultraviolet to near-infrared) but only views Earth at five angles. It has a narrower swath, meaning it will take almost a month to cover the globe. 

“They’re small and mighty and miraculously complement each other very, very well,” said Werdell. “Having multi-band, multi-angle polarimetry is going to open up a lot of really interesting opportunities for discovery, because we can see clouds and aerosols in very different ways.”

HARP2 provides daily views that will help scientists understand how aerosols and clouds interact and their role in warming and cooling in the atmosphere. 

“Understanding where aerosols are, how they’re transported, how they interact with clouds, and whether they absorb or reflect radiation is important to everybody because those characteristics are what drive warming of the atmosphere.” Werdell said.

Better air quality models 

Onsite at the Cape for the first launch attempts, Nirandi Jayasinghe and Rachel Smith, both physics graduate research assistants at UMBC, shared their excitement for the PACE mission and HARP2’s potential to help modelers predict air quality, rain, or if the atmosphere is warming or cooling. 

Jayasinghe is a data modeler who comes up with different methods to retrieve information from HARP2. Originally from Sri Lanka, Jayasinghe notes that her hometown used to be one of her country’s cleanest cities, and now due to development in Sri Lanka’s dominant neighbor, India, the air quality is extremely bad. She said HARP2 can help close the gap that exists in understanding the twilight zone—where a cloud starts and where it stops—by providing more accurate measurements. 

Smith adds that this will go a long way in understanding cloud formation processes, weather patterns, forecasting, and climate modeling—information important for agriculture, transportation, disaster preparedness, and infrastructure planning. 

“Even simple things like weather forecasting are impacted by how much dust is in the air,” said Smith, a 2026 doctoral candidate who earned her M.S. in atmospheric physics from UMBC in 2023. HARP2 will help address whether clouds have a net cooling effect or a net warming effect, which will allow for more accurate models of where Earth’s climate is headed. Smith notes that during events like the Canadian wildfires in 2023 no one could accurately predict rainfall, because the forecasting models were not accounting for the number of airborne aerosols.

“I’m really excited to see what new science questions come out of the instruments that we’re putting up in space,” she concluded.

Bouncing back from disaster 

The HARP2 team has come a long way from initial concept to PACE. What impresses Werdell the most is the UMBC team’s resilience in the face of setbacks.

The most devastating moment came in February 2022, one month before the team was set to deliver HARP2 to NASA for integration on the spacecraft. As the instrument was in the last few seconds of vibration tests, the bonding on one of the prisms loosened and shattered. 

“It tactically put us to point zero,” recalled Cieslak, who was shocked and humbled when so many NASA scientists volunteered their time and expertise to help the HARP2 team get back on track. 

“We got an extension, and within two months we had built a new engineering model and were able to prove the new solution worked. By September, we were back to where we were before the incident,” he added.

First-time NASA launch attendee Yomiyu Fekadu ’20, mechanical engineering, M.S. ’23, engineering management, recalled that time well, as he helped assemble HARP2 as an intern under Benjamin Cramer ’17, M.S. ’20, mechanical engineer on the program.  

“Especially after the failure, and the review board assessment, I helped put everything back together and do the test plans for construction and other documentation so NASA could give us the go-ahead to move on,” Fekadu said. 

The experience was pivotal to his career. “It was everything I could have asked for,” said Fekado, now a systems engineer at Northrop Grumman. “No other place would have let me be involved in the entire process, including making parts for HARP2 in the machine shop. Not only did I get to do hands-on stuff, but I also was part of the design and saw it all come together on a NASA mission.”

As the HARP2 group left the viewing platform to line up for bus rides back to the Space Center, the smiles and easy camaraderie conveyed a collective sense of pride, relief, and excitement. 

“I‘m now just anxious to see the first bytes of data,” said Cieslak, echoing the feeling of his colleagues.

In addition to the HARP team, several additional GESTAR II scientists and engineers were instrumental in their contributions  to the overall PACE mission, including Ivona Cetinić, Andrew Sayer, Violeta Sanjuan Calzado, Bridget Seegers, Susanne Craig, Dirk Aurin, Meng Gao, Inia Soto Ramos, and Ian Carroll.

Update: On February 10, HARP2 successfully connected with instrumentation on the ground and all of its systems appear to be working as intended. 

Follow along with what’s learned from the HARP2 project.