Sometimes a small act of kindness can lead to big results.

One year into her undergraduate education, Kara Freeman ’91, engineering and information technology, was doing well at UMBC. Unbeknownst to her, however, her parents were fretting how to pay for the next semester. A grade school principal of Freeman’s contacted then-vice provost Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, to ask for help.

UMBC’s future president did not know Freeman or her family personally back in 1987, but found time to speak with her mother and offer useful financial assistance tips. The family secured the necessary aid for Freeman not only to finish but to excel as a scholar. Freeman has not forgotten Hrabowski’s intervention in her success – and it has had a big impact on her life. Freeman is now the vice president of administration and chief information officer for the American Council on Education (ACE). And part of her duties at the council are to help universities such as UMBC best use technologies to help their students.

A Washington, D.C. native, Freeman was the daughter of a firefighter father and a mother who worked as an equal opportunity specialist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. She and her four siblings inherited their father’s strong work ethic and their mother’s never-say-die attitude and appreciation for helping others.
Both parents also emphasized the value of education. “They let us know how important school was and that we should stay on top of it,” she says.

Freeman started as a computer science major, but quickly migrated to information systems management, where she could focus on applying her people skills and avoid the long hours of solitude that programming often requires.

She also attributes much of her success to UMBC’s cooperative education program, which helped her land internships with IBM and General Electric: “When I graduated, I had work experience. That put me way ahead of anyone else.”

Her first job after graduation was as a systems analyst with AT&T, thanks to her tireless efforts in petitioning the company’s recruiters at job fairs. She followed this with stints working for WorldCom and MCI and, later, a consultant job for defense contractor Lockheed Martin.

In climbing the corporate ladder, however, Freeman has made a point of reaching back and helping others on the same climb. It’s a trait she picked up at UMBC, when she herself was seeking a mentor. As Freeman tells it, she and a friend never made it to a campus classroom where they were to be assigned a mentor, and instead wandered into a room filled with aspiring young mentors.

To this day, she remains in contact with her own protégée from that program, a then-nine-year-old inner-city student (who is now 30 and successful in the business world herself). And Freeman continues to participate in a variety of mentoring and education programs, including UMBC’s Center for Women and Information Technology (CWIT).

“I just have a strong need to make sure that others can learn from what I have learned,” Freeman says.

Freeman wasn’t looking for a new job when her sister pointed her to an information technology (IT) management position that had opened up at the American Council on Education. But she looked into the prospective job that offered, she observes, “a weird connection between what I love to do and what I do for a living.”
The council’s mission is to establish a national and international agenda for postsecondary education and training, and technology now plays an ever-increasing role in this effort. While part of Freeman’s job involves managing and making strategic decisions about the council’s technology, she sits on a board that advises ACE president Molly Corbett Broad on larger issues.

“When decisions are being made about any particular area, the technology needs to part of that discussion,” says Freeman. “In many cases, the [IT] folks are not at the table. Here, I can influence the decisions.”

Another part of her job involves understanding how colleges and universities use technology to help better prepare their students. Computers are becoming a core part of business and academia, yet higher education institutions can vary wildly in how they make full use of new technology. Her insights help ACE assist its members in the best use of these technologies.

Earlier this year, at ACE’s annual meeting, Freeman presented a panel about how universities can use technology. “For me, it is exciting,” she says. “Sometimes you think of IT as keeping the email on. But in this day and age, it is really much more strategic.”

— Joab Jackson ’90

How does a student 1,500 miles from home cope when disaster strikes? How does he offer help and hope across an ocean?

Huguens Jean ’12, Ph.D., electrical engineering, flew to Haiti in March 2010 to find Port-au-Prince still reeling from a devastating earthquake. The streets surrounding his childhood home felt foreign and distorted – unusually silent, filled with unfamiliar smells and crumbling buildings.

The earthquake struck in January, during the final days of his grandfather Andre Torchon’s battle with cancer. Travel to Port-au-Prince for the funeral became impossible. Two months later Jean was able to fly to Haiti with his brother, Clifford Muse ’11, information systems. Unable to fulfill their grandfather’s last request that they dress in white at his funeral to celebrate life’s joys, the brothers resolved to honor his memory in another way. They would capture on film the joys of life in Haiti, joys that endured even at a moment of profound national suffering.

The documentary Lift Up, co-directed by Jean and Phillip Knowlton ’03, visual arts, records their journey. It follows Jean and Muse as they build a kite in their grandfather’s honor, just like the kites they had flown with him as children in Haiti. A deeper look reveals Knowlton and Jean’s own journey as filmmakers, each traveling through uncharted territory to share stories of resilience in the face of profound loss with eloquence and compassion.

Jean and Knowlton met as undergraduates at UMBC when they co-captained the track and field team. They came from different worlds—the engineer from Port-au-Prince and the artist from Silver Spring, MD—but they stayed connected through their love of film, even as Jean moved on to graduate school at UMBC and Knowlton to edit music videos in New York. When the earthquake struck, their connection led to collaboration.

“We wanted to help the folks of Haiti in a way that was more meaningful than just texting money,” says Jean. “As a Haitian, it was very difficult for me to watch the devastation from a distance.” When the opportunity arose, they bridged that distance, flying to Haiti to film the post-quake recovery experience, checking their preconceptions at the gate.

The Port-au-Prince that Jean and Muse found was markedly different from the one they had left. The sense of disconnection was jarring in a different way for Knowlton, who had never before been to Haiti. Like Jean, he looked to Haitians for guidance to understand and document their experiences of survival, mourning, endurance and revival.

Jean recalls Knowlton speaking with the local residents, telling them how their strength of spirit amazed him. “To watch them sing, dance and continue with life in the midst of the devastation touched him profoundly,” says Jean, who was moved to tears as he filmed the conversations. “My friend from Maryland was in Haiti, in the middle of the rubble, helping us capture on film this very personal journey, and he did it just because he believed in our vision. I was grateful and humbled by his presence, and I cherished every bit of his collaboration and friendship.”

The result is a film that speaks to the universal importance of community in times of hardship. Lift Up contests negative representations of Haiti that the filmmakers argue have too often dominated media narratives. It also seeks to keep Haiti’s post-quake recovery in the public eye and promote longer-term humanitarian assistance there as news coverage wanes.

Lift Up reflects the vision and passion of the filmmakers as much as the experiences of its subjects. In film, Knowlton sa

UMBC’s Department of Theatre takes center stage at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts – and extends the university’s impressive legacy in college theatre’s biggest annual festival.

By Richard Byrne ’86

Washington, D.C. – It’s 7 a.m. and a pickup truck pulls up outside the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as the purples and pinks of a May dawn fade into morning daylight. Inside the truck is the entire set for the UMBC Department of Theatre’s production of Lynn Nottage’s play Las Meninas.

It’s going to be a big day for the students, faculty and staff gathered at this early hour to prepare for UMBC’s appearance at the American College Theatre Festival (ACTF). But before the cast performs before a sold-out Terrace Theatre 13 hours from now, there’s a truck that needs to be unloaded. And a set to build. And a show to rehearse. And all of it accomplished on an unfamiliar stage.

The first hurdle has already appeared. A broken freight elevator means that the pieces of associate professor of theatre Elena Zlotescu’s dynamic set must be taken up bit by bit through the Kennedy Center’s standard elevators.

Greggory Schraven ’97, the department’s technical director, is already rallying his bleary-eyed troops from the back of the pickup truck. “God gave you muscles as well as good looks,” Schraven says to one student without a piece of the set in hand.

Director Eve Muson clucks like a mother hen over cast members feeling the crush of pollen on this warm spring day. Other students hope for a glimpse of Broadway legend Bernadette Peters, who is rehearsing for a production of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies elsewhere in the building.

* * * * *

UMBC’s performance of Las Meninas at the Kennedy Center tonight is the capstone to another tremendous achievement in the theatre department’s rich history. The American College Theatre Festival is American college theatre’s biggest event, and UMBC’s selection as one of four universities to perform full-length plays here at the festival finale is the equivalent of reaching the Final Four in men’s and women’s college basketball.

“Participating in the ACTF affords us the opportunity to celebrate the unique contributions that university and college programs make to American theatre,” says Alan Kreizenbeck, a professor of theatre who also serves as the department chair. “UMBC’s long-term success in the festival demonstrates that we take this opportunity seriously and that our colleagues and audiences respond enthusiastically.”

UMBC’s path to the Kennedy Center wasn’t easy, but it was straightforward. Las Meninas advanced through an initial round of judging on campus in November 2010, and then triumphed in a second regional round of adjudication held at Towson University in January.

The investment of time, energy and money required for success in the ACTF is immense – so the university only enters every four years or so. And this year’s success with Las Meninas is only the latest chapter in UMBC’s long legacy of appearances at the ACTF.

Only Boston University has appeared more times at the Kennedy Center as part of the festival than UMBC, and Las Meninas joins a string of winning productions that started in 1975 with You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown and continued in 1979 with Five by Beckett. The theater department went two years in a row in the 1980s – with a 1987 production of The Importance of Being Oscar and again in 1988 with Springs Awakening. The last two visits to the Kennedy Center were in 1996 (The Diary of a Scoundrel) and in 2004 (Buried).

“There’s clearly a commitment at UMBC Theatre to never rest on laurels, or to simply warm-over an old idea,” says ACTF artistic director Gregg Henry. “The program always seems to be investigating, probing, and challenging the cross-disciplinary boundaries of the performing arts, consistently collaborating to make unforgettable and vital theatre events.”

The foundation of UMBC’s winning production was the play itself. Las Meninas is an early work by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage, who used a mysterious 17th century rumor of an affair between French Queen Marie-Therese of Austria and an African dwarf named Nabo as the springboard for a tragicomic meditation on race, sexual desire, politics and the clash of cultures. Las Meninas begins as a broad but brainy physical comedy and ends having explored dark corners of the human soul.

Muson recalls being attracted by the play’s provocative intelligence when she first read Las Meninas in 2001 in American Theatre magazine, and says it was near the top of her list when the department decided to compete in the 2010-2011 ACTF cycle.

“But it wasn’t just the director’s passion for it,” says Muson. “The faculty was immediately taken with it, too. The play speaks to the department’s aspirations. We can bring a lot of design creativity to it. In the world of UMBC theatre, we do unusual plays in unusual ways – or plays that you know in unusual ways. So Las Meninas is in line with our aesthetic.”

The students in the cast and crew shared that view. Rising senior Katherine Hileman, who played Queen Marie-Therese, says that “in reading the play last summer, I never looked at it as a period piece. It’s so contemporary and so true to today…. [Muson] couldn’t have picked a better script.”

Las Meninas had another plus in its favor. The play’s diversity of gender and race allowed a broad range of roles for student actors at a university as diverse as UMBC.

“You’re always looking for something with a mixed race cast,” says Muson. “When you find that play, you get really excited. You say: ‘I have the kids to do this.’”

The cast of Las Meninas was not only diverse, but also talented enough to pull off a difficult and idiosyncratic play. Among the leads, rising senior Sean McComas had the sensitivity and steel to play Louis XIV as a boy king. Katherine Kopajtic ’11 doubled up in roles as a Mother Superior and Queen Mother of France – two women perched on precisely opposite poles of sexual permissiveness.

Hileman was selected to tackle the broad tonal shifts from comedy to tragedy in Nottage’s depiction of Queen Marie-Therese – a spoiled naïve monarch who falls in love with a tiny African jester and bears his child. But the greatest challenge was assigned to Keilyn Durrel Jones ’11 who had to answer the question: How does a 6’1” actor play a dwarf?

Mostly in a swaggering crouch, it turns out. “It was very taxing,” Jones says with a gentle laugh. “I was icing my knees often, and there was always the smell of Ben Gay and ibuprofen.”

Muson concurs. “It was hard,” she says. “The body had to be believable enough. But what I find with theatre audiences is that if you say, ‘This is how we’re going to do a dwarf,’ the audience will be happy to go with you as long as you don’t violate it.”

Terrace Theatre – 11 a.m.

It’s late morning, and all is quiet backstage. The costumes are hung carefully in silent dressing rooms.

But the stage buzzes with activity and high-spirited banter. Department associate staff member Terry Cobb has got the lights arranged, and now everyone else (actors included) lay down the gaudy floor of the set and wipe down the Mylar panels that evoke the multitude of mirrors at the palace of Versailles. Greggory Schraven’s voice punctuates each accomplishment with a persistent and enthusiastic cry of “Rock’n’roll!”

Indeed, spirits are a little too high and unfocused for Eve Muson, who comes back into the theatre as the set nears completion and tries to get everyone refocused on the imminent performance. She asks sharp questions, assigns tasks, sets a time to break for lunch – and frets.

“It’s getting a little oodgie-poodgie,” observes Muson of the mood onstage. She wants less oodge and less poodge and more concentration.

* * * * *

Another factor in selecting Las Meninas as UMBC’s entry in the ACTF was the possibilities offered for Elena Zlotescu to depict French King Louis XIV’s sumptuous court at Versailles in her set and costume design.

But as an accomplished and award-winning designer, Zlotescu is less obsessed with the look of the play (“anyone can design a beautiful set”) than with how the play’s richness will shine through in her work. Las Meninas is told from the point of view of the convent-bound child of Queen Marie-Therese and Nabo, and an air of fable and fact mix uneasily in the story.

“You can’t tell from the play what is real, what is memory, what is imagination,” says Zlotescu. “It’s a combination of different worlds.” The two-way mirrors used by police in interrogation rooms were one inspiration: “You are behind the mirror, but you see everything.”

Versailles and its startling mirrored halls were also an inspiration, Zlotescu adds, as much for their usefulness in the political ambitions of the French court as their grandiose beauty.

“The most impressive moment in Versailles is when you are in the lobby with a lot of mirrors,” Zlotescu observes. “But why did Louis XIV choose to have mirrors on both sides? Well if you are in that hall with just five people, you will be multiplied and it seems as if you are surrounded by 100 people. It was about power.”

Zlotescu’s set mirrored the play’s intellectual complexity, but it also possessed a remarkable simplicity in its practical design – a key to allowing the technical team to meet the festival’s requirements that departments build and strike the set within a single day. “I don’t like things too complicated,” says Zlotescu. “You can suggest everything with simplicity.”

Despite its simplicity, Zlotescu’s set did challenge the technical capabilities of UMBC’s department. The department’s secret weapon in making things work smoothly, she says, is Greggory Schraven.

“He will never say ‘no,’” says Zlotescu.

Schraven says that the planning required for the traveling versions of Las Meninas at Towson University and the Kennedy Center “is intensive, almost military.” There are spreadsheets and schedules coordinated with a team led by senior stage manager Kiirstn Pagan ’11.

Pagan says that “things do have to change a bit” when the show shifts to a new theatre. At Towson, she says, the crew and actors were “super enthusiastic and energetic to get the show up in the three hours that we had to do it.”

The careful preparation and energy, Pagan and others say, led to the performance at Towson being one of the best of the entire Las Meninas experience. “We were all shocked at Towson at how well and how relaxed we were with the show.”

Interviewed a week or so before the Kennedy Center performance, however, Schraven was already wrestling with the fact that “the Kennedy Center was not made for the modern truck.”

Little did he know that the freight elevator would be busted, too. Yet Schraven made sure that everything went to plan on the big day – even with that unexpected hurdle.

Terrace Theatre – 1 p.m.

The load-in and construction are accomplished. Now it’s time for the cast to sharpen their performances.

Muson’s style of directing is pitched perfectly for the excellent student actors in her cast: authoritative yet never overpowering. She begins with a vocalization exercise as the actors come back from lunch – carefully pushing the cast to adjust their voices to the theatre.

“It’s a great big space,” says Muson, filling the room with her own voice. “But you’re a great big person. You’re the court of France.”

As the afternoon progresses, time gets tight. Some technical delays seep in, and one can see the gears in Muson’s mind racing. She continues to give acting notes to the cast, and changes some of the blocking on the fly.

Muson has a brainstorm deep in the second act: a simple shift in movement to liberate Kopajtic, who plays the Queen Mother, from a tight spot on the set and give her more range to perform. She seems bemused and irritated to discover a simple thing so late in the game.

“They should take away my M.F.A.,” Muson wisecracks.

One problem in the rehearsal is a fussy latch that attaches the two separate parts of the Queen’s bed which come in from opposite sides of the stage. There is a note to fix it.

Otherwise, Las Meninas is ready to go.

* * * * *

The excitement of performance is enthralling, but UMBC’s Department of Theatre is also in the education business. So what are the students involved with Las Meninas learning?

Many of the students involved in the play also take it as a six-credit class – and what they study isn’t just their lines, or the intricate details of stage management. A complicated historical play like Las Meninas offered a chance for all the students involved to dive into the play’s nooks and crannies.

“It’s a complex play, and it gives our students opportunities for research,” says Muson. “Part of what I love to do is immerse them in that research into the world of the play.” That world included the fashion, court politics and dance of the era.

The other invaluable experience for students involved in Las Meninas is the chance to take the show on the road with a talented faculty and staff who also work professionally in regional theatre.

Muson and the rest of the faculty and staff “all treat us with professionalism,” says Jones. “They train us to be professionals and they treat us as professionals. So when we got to this festival, we were relaxed, we had a confident air and professionalism about us.” McComas says the confidence imparted by Muson and the rest of the faculty led to the cast’s quiet certitude that they were putting together a play that would get them to the Kennedy Center. “We never talked about it in rehearsal,” he elaborates. “We didn’t care. It was about doing the best work we could do right here, and if we went on, we went on.”

“We treated it as any other UMBC production,” says Pagan, “which shows you the level of UMBC productions.”

Terrace Theatre – 8 p.m.

The show is officially sold out, and there’s electricity in the air as the crowd files in and finds their seats. Soon the lights go down and the play begins. Having watched the afternoon’s rehearsal, tonight’s performance of Las Meninas seems supercharged.

Indeed, the only unintended drama tonight was foreshadowed in the rehearsal. The fussy latch of Queen Marie-Therese’s bed came undone not once but twice – and there are some nervous moments on- and off-stage as Hileman and Jones successfully keep their balance and their focus in their scenes of tenderness and terror.

When the show ends, the audience showers the performers with applause. The crew is also called to the stage. Gregg Henry presents Muson with a plaque and lauds not only the performers, but their parents and UMBC administrators for their support.

For Muson, the Las Meninas journey is not over. Under her direction, the play will be part of the Columbia-based RepStage’s 2011-2012 season, incorporating much of Zlotescu’s design work.

But for this cast and crew, it’s almost over. After the show, UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, and his wife Jackie wander back to congratulate the actors. Most of them are already in dressing rooms, basking in their triumph and removing makeup, but when they hear that Hrabowski is backstage, they emerge quickly in groups of two and three – many happily disheveled – to say hello and accept their kudos from the president.

It’s a moment in which elation and exhaustion exist in simultaneity – a brief window before the cast and crew must strike the set and come home from their most excellent adventure.

Photos by Chris Hartlove

* * * * *

Web Extra

Video: Las Meninas Load-In and Rehearsal

Read more about this theatre production’s journey to the Kennedy Center here.

Video by Chris Hartlove.

UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III takes your questions.

Q. UMBC has been in the news as a new hub for the cybersecurity market. Do you see it as a growth industry for the BWI corridor, and for Maryland in general? And what are “secret” (or not so secret) weapons in UMBC’s arsenal to compete in this field and attract the best talent?

— Joab Jackson ’90

A. I think we’re becoming a model for building the cybersecurity workforce. A model for the nation.

The opening of the Northrop Grumman Cync Program here on campus is a great example. This program is part of our Cyber Incubator, and it will be helping young companies to build their capacity to solve cybersecurity problems. Our country more and more understands that we have to protect our intelligence and our broad societal computing security. All of us have to be concerned about the privacy of information.

Another exciting thing about the Northrop Grumman project is that it is in our research park – bwtech@UMBC – and UMBC is heavily connected with the National Security Agency (NSA). Over 700 of our graduates work at the NSA. And so we are becoming a magnet for cybersecurity companies. We have actually recruited 16 such companies in under two years, and continue to grow in our research park with that effort.

A number of our faculty in computer science at UMBC have been talking about cybersecurity issues for years. We received a major grant – $7.5 million dollars – from the Department of Defense about five years ago. We received that with other universities around the country but we were the lead partner. So we have been working in this space for some time. We are tied to the national infrastructure in this area. This is not new for us. We have become a destination.

The word for it is synergy. When you have national agencies and universities and school systems coming together to build a workforce capacity in cybersecurity and research strength, it becomes a major initiative for the entire state.

Q. At commencement, you always make a point of revisiting UMBC founding president Albin O. Kuhn’s charge to the members of the first graduating class at UMBC: “If you bring to the future the same personal qualities and personal commitment you have brought to this campus as students, good and important things will happen to each of you, as well as to those around you … and the university community will be proud to have played a part in your life.” Why?

— Richard Byrne’86

A. It is fascinating to see how fortunate our graduates are. I laugh sometimes with our students when they want me to feel sorry for them. Last night I was with some seniors, and Keilan Freeman, one of our seniors, was frustrated because he had to decide about graduate school in mechanical engineering between Stanford University and the University of Michigan. And I said to him: You want me to feel sorry for you?

The great news is that I can easily call up UMBC alumni who are graduate students at both institutions – and alumni who have graduated with Ph.D.s from both institutions. So that he could also call them and compare what they had to say.

And I think that is what Albin O. Kuhn was saying: people who have worked hard at UMBC are well-prepared for the workforce. They are well prepared for the next level. And I think he said it so beautifully, that it helps students who are graduating feel more secure about their future. If you can make it at UMBC, you can make it anywhere. That’s his point, and that’s my point.

Have a question for Dr. Hrabowski? Please visit retrievernet.umbc.edu/askthepresident

A university can offer up a lot of drama: joys and terrors, dark mysteries and the quest to unravel or unlock them.

The issue that you have in your hands is chock-full of such drama. There is drama in the most literal sense: the amazing journey taken by students, faculty and staff in UMBC’s Theatre Department to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

Led by associate professor Eve Muson, the department took its Fall 2010 production of Lynn Nottage’s smart and provocative play Las Meninas all the way to selection as one of only four university productions in the final round of the American College Theatre Festival. (Just think of it as the “Final Four” of U.S. college and university theatre.)

Careful planning got the cast and crew of Las Meninas to the Kennedy Center, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t thrills and (near) spills in a one-day load-in, set construction, rehearsal and performance. But you’ll need to read the story to find out how the Las Meninas gang made it work – and just how Muson’s vision of the play will live on in the forthcoming professional production of Las Meninas she will direct at Columbia’s RepStage next year.

Another drama detailed in this issue’s story by Elizabeth Heubeck ’91 is darker and more destructive, yet it also celebrates the role that historians and cultural scholars can play in reclaiming memory. When Suzanne Ostrand-Rosenberg – a professor of biological sciences and the Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Chair of Biochemistry – found a box of letters kept by her mother from Nazi-era Germany, the discovery led not only to a nearly decade-long search for her family’s history, but also an illuminating new work of scholarship on the Holocaust by Rebecca Boehling, a UMBC professor of history and director of the James T. and Virginia M. Dresher Center for the Humanities, and Uta Larkey, a professor of German and modern languages at Goucher College.

Nature has its dramas as well – and few of them are as powerful and destructive as hurricanes. So UMBC Magazine asked longtime USA Today weather writer Jack Williams to talk with Jeffrey Halverson – an associate professor of geography and environmental systems and a researcher at Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology (JCET) – who is one of America’s preeminent hurricane trackers. Halverson’s work not only sheds light on how these most impressive storms form and intensify, but his findings may help scientists and local governments take actions that will save lives when hurricanes do inevitably sweep through our area.

— Richard Byrne ’86

PUTTIN’ ON A HARD HAT

The progress on the construction of Phase I of UMBC’s new Performing Arts and Humanities Building is impressive when seen from the outside. But put on a hard hat and get into the guts of the new building that will open in Fall 2012 and that progress is even more apparent.

Already, one can see the shape of the new 275 seat theater – with high-ceilinged passageways between the scenery workshop and the stage to make set construction easier. The elegant curved lines of the James T. and Virginia M. Dresher Center for the Humanities – which overlook one of the new building’s lobbies – are also clearly discernible.

Outlines of new classrooms on the top floors are also taking shape. And did we mention the views? The building’s perch at the north end of campus offers up sweeping vistas south and west to Baltimore and the Key Bridge.

But the best news about the Performing Arts and Humanities Building, however, isn’t that Phase I is going so swimmingly. It’s that lawmakers gathered in the recently-concluded session of Maryland’s Legislature decided to close a proposed two-year gap in funding for Phase II of the building – including new concert and dance venues – and allow the university to begin construction of the final wing in 2013.

“It is clear that our governor and other state officials understand how important this project is for our campus,” says UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski III. “And the leadership of our alumna, House Speaker Pro Tem Adrienne Jones ’76, was pivotal in ensuring in the building’s completion in 2015.”

— Richard Byrne ’86

COMING HOME TO HELP

UMBC’s reputation as a magnet for adult and returning students attracts many who have served in our nation’s military. In Fall 2010, for instance, 219 Maryland veterans receiving GI Bill education benefits were studying at UMBC.

And UMBC’s outreach to veterans is expanding. A new initiative – The Maryland Campus Compact for Student Veterans – was signed by UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, in January. It committed UMBC and other state colleges and universities to centralize efforts to guide student veterans through all facets of university life and provide more training across campus in issues affecting veterans.

The compact was spearheaded by Maryland Lt. Governor Anthony G. Brown – a colonel in the Army Reserves, a graduate of the Reserved Officer Training Corps (ROTC) and the nation’s highest ranking elected official to have served a tour of duty in Iraq.

The agreement formalized outreach efforts that were already under way. In February 2010, the university’s division of student affairs established a Vets 2 Vets program in its off-campus student affairs office, offering support services, networking opportunities and referrals to a wide network of resources on-and-off-campus. UMBC’s Vets 2 Vets program will also offer an orientation session for new veterans on campus in early August.

“The UMBC community is proud to welcome returning veterans to campus,” said Hrabowski after signing the compact. “We know the transition back to the classroom can be challenging, and we are committed to supporting student veterans with access to the information and services they need to be successful.”

— Richard Byrne ’86

NET GAIN FOR ALUMNI

If you’re an alumna or alumnus who’s already plugged into getting UMBC information via email, you’ve likely discovered that our online community – Retriever Net – has a brand new face.

The makeover began over a year ago, when we asked alumni what they wanted from a web community. Among the priorities that emerged from the feedback were more campus news, more notice about alumni events and easier ways to reconnect with former classmates. Alumni also wanted a fresher look and greater clarity in the website.

The Retriever Net redesign addressed all those priorities and desires – linking alumni directly to events on campus and to news from faculty and students. Plus the site makes it easier to find information about alumni events, discounts and other benefits of being a UMBC graduate. The range of things you can now do via Retriever Net includes:

• Submit class notes with photos that will be published online and in the magazine
• Search a password-protected alumni directory
• Update your personal information and even upload a photo
• Send messages to old classmates
• Browse an up-to-date calendar of alumni events
• Use your new login to access both Retriever Net and myUMBC, the central campus web portal

But don’t take our word for it! Check out the new Retriever Net and tell us what you think! Fill out our user survey by July 31 at http://alumni.umbc.edu/sitefeedback and you may win a $15 Amazon gift card!

— Meredith Purvis

EXCELLING BY EXAMPLE

The TIAA-CREF Theodore M. Hesburgh Award for Leadership Excellence is among the highest awards for academic leadership. Named after the former University of Notre Dame president who guided that institution to national preeminence, the annual prize recognizes the personal leadership that a university or college president has provided for the greater good of society.

In 2011, a distinguished panel of judges singled out the work of UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, for the prize, which he received at the American Council on Education (ACE) annual meeting in Washington, D.C., in March.

Stephanie Bell-Rose, head of the TIAA-CREF Institute, which sponsors the prize, observed that “Dr. Hrabowski’s leadership at UMBC and commitment to underrepresented groups in science and engineering has had a powerful impact on both the Maryland system and on higher education as a whole. The Hesburgh award honors those higher education leaders who demonstrate innovative thinking, a positive impact on both higher education and society and a willingness to collaborate both within and outside the university, all of which are embodied by Dr. Hrabowski’s work.”

UMBC’s president used the occasion to urge greater innovation within the academy as a critical element in helping the nation face an unprecedented set of challenges. “It takes all of us in the academy to build our institutions and prepare the next generation of leaders,” Hrabowski said. “Higher education is more important now than ever before for both our nation and humankind. I am honored to accept this award on behalf of my UMBC colleagues and students, and to have our work associated with the example of extraordinary leadership provided by Father Hesburgh.”

— Richard Byrne ’86

Hurricanes are powerful – and they also hold great mysteries. UMBC researcher Jeffrey Halverson uses the latest technology in collaboration with NASA to unlock those secrets and make potential storm victims safer.

By Jack Williams

Hurricanes as strong as the infamous Hurricane Katrina which ravaged New Orleans and the coast of the Gulf of Mexico in 2005 rarely hit the Delmarva area. But as Hurricane Isabel showed in 2003, a hurricane – even a storm that is weakening – can cause serious damage to our region.

Isabel’s power pushed water up the Chesapeake Bay to flood Fells Point and the Inner Harbor in Baltimore. It also damaged many buildings at the U.S. Naval Academy and in other parts of Annapolis. The cost of Isabel’s flooding and wind in Maryland and Washington, D.C. was estimated at $945 million – but fortunately only one death was reported.

Hurricanes such as Isabel and Katrina now cost the United States an average of $10 to $11 billion a year, and yet the population of coastal areas frequented by hurricanes continues to grow. And while Katrina was the deadliest and most expensive U.S. hurricane ever, a wide variety of storms have attracted close attention from hurricane researchers.

Some of that research is being done in the Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology (JCET), where associate director and UMBC associate professor of geography and environmental systems Jeffrey Halverson works with colleagues from NASA to tackle questions about hurricanes that could help save lives.

JCET is a joint effort between UMBC and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and the center’s researchers have the advantage of possessing some of the latest technology available to help guide their search for

answers. One of the most pressing questions that Halverson and his colleagues are trying to solve is what information forecasters need to better predict when a hurricane will intensify quickly and become that much more dangerous.

Since the 1950s, scientists have learned enough to enable forecasters to do a much better job of predicting where a hurricane is likely to go. But Halverson observes that “there has not been much progress in forecasting intensity changes.”

Hurricane Wilma’s ferocious journey over the Caribbean Sea in October 2005 illustrates just what can happen when storms suddenly gain power. In a mere 24 hours, Wilma strengthened from a 69 mph tropical storm to a 172 mph Category 5 hurricane. Fortunately, Wilma’s winds then weakened to 150 mph before the storm hit the Mexican island of Cozumel and then Cancun two days after reaching peak strength, and those precious 48 hours gave local governments time to move thousands of residents and tourists out of harm’s way.

The nightmare for hurricane forecasters is a storm like Wilma that kills hundreds of people after strengthening with little or no warning, leaving government officials and residents in a populated area only hours – instead of days – of warning.

In order to help forecasters better predict when a hurricane will intensify in an explosive fashion, scientists such as Halverson need to learn exactly what happens before a storm begins to grow into a monster, how to detect precursors to intensification, and then update forecasting computer models to handle the new data.

“The storm speaks to us in code that we’re trying to understand,” Halverson says.

Scientists armed with technology have already cracked some of the code. Global-scale winds at levels of up to 30,000 feet steer a hurricane across the ocean and land, and forecasts that track storms have improved as scientists learned more about how hurricanes interact with these winds. Forecasts of how winds will change

during a hurricane’s life have also improved. Indeed, many outside factors – especially the temperature of the ocean over which a hurricane is moving and the speeds and directions of global-scale winds around it – help determine when a hurricane will weaken or strengthen.

Scientists still need to learn more about what happens inside a storm that’s about to intensify. This part of the code is difficult because a hurricane is a cauldron of rising and sinking air moving in horizontal and vertical swirls ranging in size from inches across to the hundred-miles or larger diameter of wind spiraling into the storm. Water is changing among its vapor, liquid and ice phases to warm or cool rising and falling air. The moving air and changing temperatures are all interacting in ways that aren’t always clear.

“There is a lot of the physics we don’t understand,” Halverson admits. “We are trying to adapt new technologies to answer these questions.”

Up Up And Away

One way to get closer to the physics of hurricanes is to get physically closer to them – close enough to measure. Often the best way to research bad weather is in an airplane.

Halverson began conducting weather research from airplanes even before earning his Ph.D. in environmental science from the University of Virginia in 1995.

From November 1993 to February 1994, he worked aboard a NASA DC-8 research airplane as the scientist in charge of the cylindrical packages of instruments called dropsondes – sometimes described as “Pringles cans with microprocessors and parachutes.” After being dropped from an airplane, a dropsonde radios back data on temperatures, humidity and air pressure as it falls to the ocean. (In recent years, dropsondes have also been fitted with GPS receivers and have added wind speed and direction data to the data they send back as they descend.)

In addition to his time spent on that NASA DC-8 and on other airplanes, Halverson has also conducted weather research on ships, and worked in the jungles of the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific studying El Niño – the chain of ocean-atmospheric events that can affect weather around the globe – which begins with a cooling of the same western tropical Pacific Ocean where Halverson and other scientists conducted their 1993-94 research.

That project is a model for how meteorological research has been conducted since the 1950s. Groups of scientists begin by observing the weather with sophisticated instruments and then use the data to form hypotheses. Halverson adds that computer models and satellite monitoring have also become an important part of the process.

Halverson’s scientific career boasts a direct link to Bob and Joanne Simpson, the pioneers of airborne hurricane research and computer weather models. Halverson did postdoctoral work with Joanne Simpson at NASA in the mid-to-late-1990s, and has also worked on projects with Bob Simpson.

In an April 2005 talk given at an Explorers Club dinner in Washington, D.C., Halverson acknowledged the Simpsons in the audience, observing that Bob Simpson’s invention of hurricane-research flying “led to a great deal of what scientists know about hurricanes that no one knew before the 1950s. All of the brilliant research started with getting eyeballs into storms.” He also noted that Joanne Simpson was not only the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in meteorology, but also the first person to develop a computer model of what happens in a cumulus cloud.

These days, Halverson is pushing the Simpsons’ legacy of innovation into the future. He is now a project scientist for the next big step in airborne hurricane research: sending the unmanned NASA Global Hawk airplane above the tops of hurricanes to help study their formation and intensification. He says 2010 “was the first time we flew the Global Hawk… it will revolutionize what we know about hurricanes… it’s the first time we’ll have a view from 65,000 feet over 25 hours. This will transform hurricane flying from reconnaissance to surveillance.”

The Global Hawk’s ability to stay in or above a storm longer than previous airplanes used for research is what is transforming the process from reconnaissance to surveillance. It is the latest tool for researchers in a wide range of airplanes used for big projects, including NASA’s DC-8, an ER-2 (NASA’s version of the U-2 spy plane), two WB-57s (a 1950s bomber now carrying research instruments), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s two WP-3 turboprops.

All of these airplanes maneuver inside or above a storm at the same time, but at different altitudes, to capture a more complete picture of what’s happening. The NOAA WP-3s slice through a hurricane’s eye 5,000 to 10,000 feet above the ocean, while the DC-8 flies at 40,000 feet on top of the storm and the ER-2 or the WB-57s soar high above the top. Depending on how far a storm is from the airplanes’ land bases, they all might be able to spend only the same two or three hours in a storm with the rest of their six- to ten-hour trips flying to and from the storm.

The Global Hawk, on the other hand, can stay in the air as long as 25 hours with its pilots at computers back at the missions base who work in shifts to keep the Hawk flying.

Halverson was a mission scientist for a NASA experiment in August and September 2010 that used the Global Hawk. It examined the formation and strengthening of storms in the Gulf of Mexico and western Atlantic Ocean. One Global Hawk flight included 20 passes over the eye of Hurricane Carl. NASA’s DC-8, a WB-57 and the Global Hawk also flew together on several data-collection flights.

“This has the possibility of reinventing what we do” says Halverson, who’ll be working with the Hawk as a member of the science team for NASA’s “Hurricane and Severe Storms Sentinel” mission from 2012 to 2014 to study hurricane genesis and intensity changes.

Few But Deadly: Why?

The “genesis” part of NASA’s “Hurricane and Severe Storms Sentinel” mission is a continuing quest to answer a question that Joanne Simpson and her colleagues asked more than 50 years ago: “Why are there so few hurricanes?”

The essential conditions needed for a tropical storm to form and grow into a 74 mph or faster hurricane for hurricane formation – including 80-degree-plus ocean water that’s at least 150 feet deep – are present for half of each year over many parts of the tropical Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico.

Each year, 80 to 90 minor disturbances dubbed “easterly waves” move off Africa and traverse the Atlantic Ocean, but only a mere 10 to 12 of these actually spawn hurricanes. The easterly waves also offer no obvious clues that this is going to happen.

In the new mission, researchers will use two Global Hawks operating from NASA’s Wallops Island Flight Facility on the Virginia coast near Chincoteague during the 2012 through 2014 Atlantic hurricane seasons.

Those easterly waves are a key question for researchers. “Is there something about a seedling that makes it develop?” Halverson asks. “Is there something coming off Africa that gives it a head start?”

Halverson and other researchers believe that the answers to these questions and to why hurricanes sometimes intensify as quickly as Hurricane Wilma did are probably related. And that’s where the Global Hawk may provide new clues to formation and intensification. “If you’re not out there over time,” Halverson observes, “you miss what could be important parts of what happens to cause a hurricane to form or strengthen. With two Hawks, each flying for 25 hours, one can be going out to a storm as the other is coming in. We won’t miss a thing.”

Halverson adds that one of the lures of scholarship is sharing his work not only with other scientists through technical articles for scientific journals, but also with the general public.

“I enjoy enchanting others with science,” he says. And his radio and television interviews for the National Geographic Channel, the Discovery Channel and the Voice of America have been key avenues in doing so. Baltimore area television stations frequently call on Halverson for brief interviews when a hurricane is in the news.

Halverson has written a monthly column for Weatherwise Magazine – a publication targeted at general readers interested in the weather – for seven years. He also wrote the foreword and scientific sections of Stefan Bechtel’s 2006 book Roar of the Heavens: Surviving Hurricane Camille, about the 1969 hurricane that killed 143 people on the Gulf of Mexico’s coast when it came ashore, and 113 more in Virginia, most in Nelson County, where 30 inches of rain on the mountains caused flash floods.

Halverson is also developing a digital museum exhibit on the meteorology of the Hurricane Camille flood in Nelson County for the county’s historical society. It explains in images and words non-scientists can understand how Camille, which was then a tropical depression with winds less than 39 mph, dumped enough rain to cause a level of erosion on some mountains that would normally take over 1,000 years to occur.

In trying to bring weather’s secrets to the wider masses, Halverson says his model is the late astronomer Carl Sagan, who helped popularize science through articles, books and the classic 1980 PBS series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.

“[Sagan] was one of my heroes,” Halverson says. “I’m part of the generation of kids he inspired. If I can do that, it will be a great service.”

Images courtesy of NASA

UMBC professor of biology Suzanne Ostrand-Rosenberg found a box of faded letters that led her deep into her family’s history­–and led scholars to fascinating new findings in Holocaust studies.

By Elizabeth Heubeck ’91

Suzanne Ostrand-Rosenberg’s mother Marianne came of age as a German Jew during the rise of Nazism and the beginnings of the Holocaust. But she said very little to her daughter about her family’s history during that trying period.

“Growing up in a house where you sort of knew something happened, though it was never discussed—it’s as if those years never happened,” says Ostrand-Rosenberg, who is now a professor of biological sciences and the Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Chair of Biochemistry at UMBC. Her voice trails off as she excuses herself to wipe away some tears.

But Marianne Steinberg Ostrand did have a story to tell her daughter (and others) about those difficult years. As Ostrand-Rosenberg cleaned out her parents’ home in Columbia a few years ago, sifting through drawers, cabinets, and closets and taking stock of a lifetime’s worth of family memorabilia, she spotted a worn brown cardboard box emblazoned with old-style German writing.

The box contained a stack of about 200 wartime letters written by family members, many of them from her grandmother, great aunt and great uncle to her mother. Most of them were dated between 1938 and 1941, after Ostrand-Rosenberg’s mother had left Germany and come to the United States.

More discoveries emerged as Ostrand-Rosenberg dug deeper. “Each day I’d find a whole new stash,” she says.

That correspondence and other documents are now seeing the light of day in a new book, Life and Loss in the Shadows of the Holocaust (Cambridge University Press), co-authored by Rebecca Boehling, a UMBC professor of history and director of the James T. and Virginia M. Dresher Center for the Humanities, and Uta Larkey, an associate professor of German Studies at Goucher College.

Though the story of Ostrand-Rosenberg’s family shares a great deal in common with other narratives of the persecution, exile and attempted extermination of Europe’s Jews in that era, it also holds many surprises and adds new shadings and nuances to the historical record of Nazi Germany and its Jewish population. (See “Between the Lines”)

And as the two humanities scholars helped to tease out the rich narrative contained in the biology professor’s family letters (and also in other family letters, diaries, and interviews with living relatives), the three women formed a close and unexpected relationship—with one another, and with the subjects of the book.

“I think [Boehling and Larkey] know more about my family than I do,” observes Ostrand-Rosenberg.

A Box of Letters

The first brown cardboard box of letters that she found held as many questions as answers about Ostrand-Rosenberg’s family history. But her family’s circumstances left her largely in the dark. Her 91-year-old father was preparing to move to a retirement community mere months after her mother had been placed in an Alzheimer’s care facility.

Feeling somewhat overwhelmed by her discovery, Ostrand-Rosenberg shared her findings with colleagues. Phyllis Robinson, a fellow professor of biology, knew Boehling from her work on UMBC’s Gender and Women Studies Coordinating Committee and suggested the historian as a possible resource. Boehling’s areas of academic research include the Holocaust, and she has written a book – A Question of Priorities: Democratic Reforms and Economic Recovery in Postwar Germany (Berghahn) – on the American occupation of Germany.

When Ostrand-Rosenberg and Boehling talked about the letters, it turned out to be fortuitous timing. Deborah Gayle ’02, M.A. historical studies, a trained archivist studying with Boehling, was seeking a meaningful thesis project. Gayle organized the initial set of over 100 letters, photocopied them on acid-free paper and then entered them into a database. To complete her historical studies master’s project, Gayle also prepared a narrative based on the English-language letters and her research on the Holocaust with input from Ostrand-Rosenberg.

Gayle’s work on the letters gave Ostrand-Rosenberg something tangible to share with cousins as far away as Chile and Israel. “When Sue shared the letters with her cousins, they decided they really wanted more,” Boehling recalls.

The cousins also dug out family letters in their possession from the same time period, and the aggregation of family information made Boehling consider writing a book based on the letters. But as she was deeply entrenched in a new study on denazification in postwar Germany, she hesitated to take on another book project by herself.

Enter Uta Larkey. Her husband, Edward Larkey, a professor of modern languages and linguistics at UMBC, had briefly attended graduate school with Boehling. The two scholars lost contact but later found themselves as colleagues at UMBC in 1989, at which point they co-organized a conference on German unification at the university and later team-taught a seminar on culture in Nazi Germany. Occasionally, Boehling socialized with Uta, a native of the former East Germany.

During one of those informal get-togethers, Boehling shared her interest in the letters. “When I talked to Uta about a possible book project, I was thinking out loud. She was starting to do Holocaust storytelling,” Boehling says. “We decided to do it [the book] together.”

Correspondence Course

Co-authorship on the project made sense, given that both women shared a professional interest in the Holocaust. But they did come to the project with different research perspectives and skills.

“Uta came to this project as a non-historian,” recalls Boehling. “She was teaching a Holocaust film and culture course. As a historian, I was learning to be a more creative writer, as she was learning to be more of a historian.”

Blending talents took time, but Boehling and Larkey worked carefully to create a book that would present the family’s personal history within its historical context.

“The voice [of the book] came together through many revisions. After quite a while, we could hear each other’s voice,” Larkey says. The materials from which the authors worked grew significantly as they dove into the project. The authors gleaned information from family diaries and journals; conducted interviews with living relatives; and re-traced the family’s footsteps in Altenessen, the German suburb of Essen where Ostrand-Rosenberg’s mother lived until she immigrated to the United States.

But the letters – personal, eloquent, and hand-written, sometimes several pages long – remained at the heart of the enterprise. “These were not just quick, email-type things. These were real letters,” says Ostrand-Rosenberg.

The vast majority of the letters were written between 1938, when Ostrand-Rosenberg’s mother emigrated from Germany, and 1947. There were scores of letters between her parents and correspondence between Ostrand-Rosenberg’s mother and her grandmother, Selma Kaufmann, her grandmother’s sister, Henny Kaufmann, and with her mother’s siblings: Lotti and Kurt.

The letters provide first-hand accounts of how the family was affected by the political unrest that entered their lives with the rise of the Nazi regime. They also detail the family’s fears about World War II and urgent negotiations over obtaining visas for family members to emigrate from Germany during the war. The letters also give insight into Selma and Henny’s experience as two of the first female business owners in a suburb of Essen (it was highly unusual in that era for women to own businesses), as well as the eventual closure of their business as the Nazi regime passed more and more laws discriminating against Germany’s Jews.

Sorting through the massive amount of correspondence was an enormous task. Ostrand-Rosenberg, Boehling, and Larkey copied the letters together, and collectively built upon the database that Deborah Gayle had begun.

“We had some 600 letters to work with,” Boehling recalls. “One spring break, (Uta and I) spent the whole time going through the letters.”

“We stood at the copy machine at UMBC for hours, copying letters,” Larkey recalls.

Not an Ordinary Research Project

The grunt work of collecting, sorting and copying letters – and pursuing their context through other avenues – yielded a useful and unique contribution to Holocaust scholarship. But it also became a richly personal and moving experience for the researchers and for the woman who first set them on the trail of her family history.

“When I would read a particularly emotional letter, I would find myself in tears,” acknowledges Boehling, who grew so close to the book project she said she began having dreams about its subjects.

A number of the letters are indeed heartbreaking, such as this one that Ostrand-Rosenberg’s grandmother Selma wrote to a friend from a so-called “communal camp” in Cologne in 1942:

Now our fate has also been decided. We will have to move into the barracks on 18 February. I am hoping for a little reprieve (Galgenfrist), but all living quarters have to be vacated by the end of the month. You can imagine our mood, I don’t want to say more about that, but hope that now one won’t lose the nerve to survive this time. Only the hope that it will get better for us…

The research project also galvanized and inspired Ostrand-Rosenberg’s family. Gideon Sella, Ostrand-Rosenberg’s first cousin and a photographer in Tel Aviv, photographed Selma’s letters, then ripped them apart and artistically arranged them into an oversized collage.

Larkey felt “overwhelmed” when Sella shared his artwork—both by the powerful statement it made, and by seeing the handwriting that she had worked with so extensively. Fittingly, the cover of the book contains a piece of Sella’s collage.

Ostrand-Rosenberg feels gratitude at having the story that began with a brown cardboard box told at last. “I will be forever indebted to Rebecca and Uta for giving me what happened,” she says. “I never would have known it otherwise.”

Boehling also sees the book not only as a scholarly endeavor, but as a recovery of family memory. “I think the book won’t be just for her [Ostrand-Rosenberg], but for her children and grandchildren, as a way of getting to know that part of the family that none of them ever shared.”

Kevin Cepelak ’05, political science, has a job that comes with a pass that gets him into any Major League Baseball (MLB) park. And when he gets to his office near New York City’s Grand Central Station each day, he rubs elbows with former greats of the game and a chance to work with former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents and former New York City Police Department investigators. And he spends his days compiling reports that help MLB officials tackle problem issues in professional sports ranging from steroids to gambling.

Cepelak’s work as an analyst for MLB’s Department of Investigations – professional baseball’s internal watchdog on a variety of issues involving the sport’s integrity – is heady and somewhat surprising stuff for a recent UMBC graduate. After all, the sport that Cepelak played as a Retriever from 2002 through 2005 involved sticks, not bats.

“I never thought in a million years that I’d go from lacrosse to working in baseball,” says Cepelak over lunch at an Italian restaurant near MLB’s Park Avenue headquarters.

The MLB department where Cepelak works as an analyst is a key element in professional baseball’s strong renaissance in recent years. Starting with a 232-day player strike that shut down the 1994 playoffs and World Series, and continuing with a string of scandals involving performance-enhancing drugs that tarnished historic achievements (including wildly-popular pursuits of home run records by athletes including sluggers Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds), pro baseball suffered a number of self-inflicted wounds over more than a decade.

The biggest step in the turnaround was a 2007 report on performance-enhancing drugs initiated by MLB commissioner Bud Selig and authored by diplomat and former U.S. Senator George Mitchell. Not only did the “Mitchell Report” help clear the air, but in 2008, Selig acted on the report’s recommendation that baseball create an independent investigations unit to help police the game.

“The main objective of our department is to protect the integrity of the game,” says Cepelak, whose portfolio ranges from diving into MLB’s database to compile research for probes into performance-enhancing drugs and gambling to helping players navigate the increasingly complex and sticky issues of social media such as Facebook and Twitter. He also creates regular reports for the department on broader trends in drug use and gambling across professional sports.

“I enjoy it a lot,” says Cepelak. “The job changes every day. No one case is like another case.”

After graduation from UMBC, Cepelak worked in local government on Long Island for county legislator Jon Cooper as he worked on a master’s degree in criminal justice from Boston University. When the job posting for his current position came onto his radar, Cepelak leapt at the opportunity to work for Major League Baseball.

“I always wanted to work on the investigative side of things,” he says, “whether it be in law enforcement or compliance.” Cepelak also relishes the opportunity to be mentored by a team of seasoned professionals put together by the league to police the game that includes former FBI and New York City Police Department investigators.

“These guys were all-stars at their jobs,” observes Cepelak. “They are the best of the best.”

Sports have always been a big part of Cepelak’s life, and his memories of UMBC center largely on the fellowship that he felt with his fellow athletes – in lacrosse and in other sports – at the university.

“Lacrosse was my big thing,” recalls Cepelak. “UMBC athletics was like one big family. You get to know the people not just in your sport but in other sports. You party together. You see each other on campus. There’s a camaraderie and great friendship that lasts over four years.”

Cepelak cites UMBC’s men’s lacrosse coach Don Zimmerman as a mentor during his UMBC years, and adds that the university’s focus on the “student” part of the student-athlete was a foundation for his success.

“Being a Division I athlete, you have to be focused and prepared to handle the academics and also playing your sport all year round,” he says. “And usually how well you did in academics reflected how well you did on the field.”

While Cepelak is understandably tight-lipped about professional baseball’s sensitive internal investigations, he does mention that the Dominican Republic’s baseball industry is much of his work and that of the department. Steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs are largely unregulated in that country, he observes, and young players are often exploited by unscrupulous trainers and other professional scouts.

“You can get steroids over the counter,” Cepelak notes. “And you have trainers down there who are injecting players [with them], and the players don’t know what they’re being injected with.”

— Richard Byrne ’86