Dr. Liang Zhu attended the AACU's 2018 Transforming STEM Higher Education conference held in Atlanta GA in November 2018. This conference aims at charting a path toward the reform of STEM higher education by strategically integrating disciplinary introspection, social consciousness, and self-reflection into the conference experience. Dr. Zhu presented a paper entitled "Improvement of students' retention and graduation via integration of research into education", which shows the positive outcomes of one of the important S-STEM program features at UMBC. The conference also provide a platform for interaction among participants via workshops, small group discussions, and keynote speeches. It was a wonderful experience to get to know other researchers in engineering education and publicize research outcomes of our S-STEM scholarship program.