Written by Meredith Oyen, associate professor of history and Asian studies, UMBC

When the votes are being tallied in Taiwan’s presidential election, it won’t be only the 23.6 million inhabitants of the island eagerly awaiting the result of the Taiwanese election – in Beijing and Washington, too, there will be some anxious faces.

The vote of Jan. 13, 2024, is seen as a litmus test for the future of cross-strait relations, coming at a time when the status quo over Taiwan – a territory Beijing claims as an integral part of “one China” – is being challenged. If Taiwan’s incumbent, independence-oriented party stays in power, Chinese leader Xi Jinping might feel he has no choice but to force the issue of reunification.

Conversely, if the opposition – which agrees with Beijing that Taiwan and the mainland are part of “one China” but not about who governs it – wins the election, Beijing might feel it has more space to be patient on the issue.

In the run-up to the vote, Beijing has ramped up military exercises in and around the Taiwan Strait in an apparent warning to Taiwanese voters. On Jan. 6, in one of the most recent incidents, China sent a series of balloons over the island, which the Taiwan government cited as a threat to air travel and an attempt at intimidation.

Meanwhile, in his annual New Year’s address, Xi stated that “China will surely be reunified,” raising fears internationally that he intends to pursue the issue militarily if necessary.

For Washington, too, the outcome of the vote will have implications. The United States has cultivated strong ties with the current leadership of Taiwan. But recent tensions in the strait have raised the risk of war. U.S. actions deemed provocative by Beijing, such as the 2022 visit of then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan, have resulted in China upping its military threats in the strait. And this has raised speculation that China’s patience is growing thin and its timeline for reunification is growing shorter.

Meanwhile, questions about the U.S. capacity to respond to any Chinese aggression over Taiwan have risen; the specter of war in a third region of the world – after Ukraine and Israel – worries national security leadership in Washington.

Independence on the ballot?

The presidential election in Taiwan has come down to a three-way race. The front-runner is current Vice President William Lai,* who is the candidate of the Democratic Progressive Party. The DPP views Taiwan as a sovereign country and does not seek reunification with China.

Lai’s challengers are New Taipei City mayor Hou Yu-ih, of the Kuomintang (KMT), and Ko Wen-je, a former mayor of Taipei running for the center-left Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). The KMT embraces the idea of future reunification with China under a democratic government. The TPP criticizes both DPP and KMT platforms on cross-strait relations as too extreme and seeks a middle ground that maintains the status quo: A Taiwan that is de facto sovereign, but with strong economic and cultural ties with China.

Taiwan law mandates that no polls are published in the 10 days before the election. As of Jan. 3, when the final polls were published, averages had Lai leading with 36%, with Hou at 31% and Ko at 24%.

Lai has consistently led in the polls, prompting the KMT and TPP to earlier consider running on a joint ticket. But the two parties failed to agree on terms, and the coalition attempt imploded.

This may prove crucial, as joining forces may have represented the best chance of a KMT candidate being elected – an outcome that may have cooled tensions with Beijing.

Taiwanese democracy

The island of Taiwan has been governed as the “Republic of China” since 1949, when the KMT lost a civil war to the Chinese Communist Party. The CCP set up the People’s Republic of China on the mainland, and the KMT retreated to Taiwan.

For decades, both the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China diverged on every possible policy except one: Both governments agreed that there was only one China, and that Taiwan was a part of China. They each sought to unite Taiwan and the mainland – but under their own rule.

Although that remains the goal in Beijing today, for Taiwan the outlook has started to change.

The change began with Taiwanese democratization – a process that began in the early 1990s after decades of autocratic rule. After gradually rolling out direct elections for the legislature, governors and mayors, the island held its first democratic election for president in 1996. Despite Beijing holding military exercises in the Taiwan Strait in an attempt to interfere with the vote, the KMT-affiliated incumbent won against a DPP candidate with strong ties to the Taiwan independence movement.

Four years later, the DPP’s candidate won and started the first of two consecutive terms. In 2008, a KMT candidate returned to power. But since 2016, Taiwan has been led by Tsai Ing-wen of the DPP.

Uneasy consensus

Cross-strait tensions tend to rise when the DPP is in office and calm somewhat when the KMT is in power. This isn’t because the KMT agrees with Beijing over the status of Taiwan – the party has always been clear that unification could happen only under its own government and never under the leadership of the Communist Party in Beijing. But the KMT affirms the idea that eventual unification with China is its goal for Taiwan.

In 1992, representatives of the KMT and the CCP met in Hong Kong and reached the “1992 Consensus.” Despite the name, the two sides do not fully agree on what it meant. The KMT affirmed the idea of one China but noted disagreement on what the government of that China should be; the People’s Republic of China interpreted it as affirming one China under CCP rule.

Still, the 1992 Consensus became the basis of a series of policies strengthening cross-strait ties, and it made KMT-led governments easier for the PRC to tolerate.

Pro-independence sentiment

Though speculation about the geopolitical fallout and China’s reaction to the election has dominated coverage of the vote around the world, for Taiwan voters, independence is one of several critical issues the island faces. The economy frequently rises even above cross-strait issues in importance, with many voters expressing concern over the rapid rise of housing prices, stagnating salaries, slow economic growth and how the incumbent party handled the COVID-19 pandemic.

On the issue of independence itself, Taiwanese polls have shown a creep toward pro-independence sentiment. As of September 2023, nearly half of Taiwanese voters said they preferred independence (48.9%) for the island, while 26.9% sought a continuation of the status quo. A shrinking minority – now just 11.8% – said they hoped for future reunification.

If the DPP remains in power, Beijing may feel the pressure to force the issue of reunification. Xi has called for the Chinese military to be capable of a successful cross-strait invasion by 2027, though a forceful reunification effort might include a combination of economic blockade and military pressure.

If that were to be the case, U.S. commitments to Taiwan – along with U.S. credibility among its Asian allies – could be on the line. President Joe Biden has repeatedly said that he is prepared to defend the island militarily against an attack from mainland China.

Already in 2024, the U.S. is having to contend with two significant conflicts that are demanding its attention. How Taiwanese voters mark their ballot – and how policymakers in Beijing respond – may determine whether a third war is more or less likely.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article and see more than 250 UMBC articles available in The Conversation.

Written by John Rennie Short, professor emeritus of public policy, UMBC

On a recent research trip to China, I wandered through the Oasis Mall in suburban Shanghai. Like many Chinese shopping malls, this complex was filled with empty stores that reflected the end of China’s 30-year-long economic expansion. But there also were surprises.

Along a stretch of the mall’s interior walkway, a cluster of parents and grandparents sat on chairs. They were looking through a plate glass window, watching a dozen 5- to 7-year-old girls practice ballet steps, carefully following their teacher’s choreography. A space initially designed for retail had been turned into a dance studio.

From 1990 through 2020, large, shiny shopping malls embodied China’s spectacular economic growth. They sprouted in cities large and small to meet consumer demand from an emerging middle class that was keen to express its newfound affluence. These centers look familiar to American eyes, which isn’t surprising: U.S. architectural firms built 170 malls in China during this period.

Like their U.S. counterparts, many Chinese malls have fallen on hard times. The COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of online shopping have devastated foot traffic, leaving the nation with a huge overhang of retail space. But many Chinese malls are being re-imagined by owners and users as palaces of experience – civic areas for communities to meet and interact, with new configurations of public and private space.

As a longtime urban policy scholar, I was fascinated by the new uses I saw for malls in China. In my view, these experiments could become models for new, creative uses of retail space in the U.S., where the mall was invented.

Serving a new consumer class

China opened up to foreign trade and investment less than 50 years ago. Since then, it has become the world’s second-largest economy, surpassed only by the U.S.

Rising incomes and a massive population shift from rural areas to cities have created a growing middle class with significant purchasing power. GDP per capita increased from US$293 in 1985 to $12,500 by 2021.

Today, approximately 350 million Chinese – 25% of the total population – can be considered middle class. More recent economic growth has generated growing income inequality that now is equivalent to U.S. levels.

Malls became a motif of modernity during the country’s economic expansion. They offered consumers year-round protection from heat, humidity, cold and frost, as well as from busy streets and polluting traffic. Malls were safe environments where the steadily increasing numbers of more affluent Chinese families could shop and eat, stroll and meet.

Over the past 30 years, China’s malls have faced economic booms and slumps. For example, the New South China Mall in Dongguan – which is twice the size of Minnesota’s Mall of America, its largest U.S. counterpart – opened in 2005. But most of its 2,300 storefronts remained closed for over a decade as China fought off recession after the 2008 world financial crisis. https://www.youtube.com/embed/5zPkm2SU1DM?wmode=transparent&start=0 This 2013 news report takes viewers inside the then-deserted New South China Mall in Dongguan.

China weathered that downturn through aggressive economic stimulus policies, and within a decade it replaced the U.S. as the world’s top driver of economic growth. This expansion buoyed its retail sector, including shopping centers. By 2018, a renovated and modernized New South China Mall was near full occupancy.

Then COVID-19 struck in 2020. The Chinese government adopted a rigid zero-COVID policy, in which local governments could impose lockdowns after detecting just a few cases. Hundreds of millions of people were restricted to their homes for weeks or months at a stretch.

This policy was lifted only in late 2022. China’s economy has yet to fully recover, and many experts argue that it will never again reach its previous rates of growth. An aging population, trade wars with the U.S. and a government focused on centralizing power under the Communist Party are all acting as drags on the economy, and online shopping is drawing consumers away from stores.

As a result, Chinese media reports abound with stories about well-known stores and venerable malls closing. In China, as in the U.S., what scholars once described as the “magic of the mall” has become an “allure of ruins.”

Malls with Chinese characteristics

But the Chinese are making creative use of excess mall space. New users are filling nonretail areas, such as indoor walkways and atriums that now house café tables. Others have become children’s play spaces filled with giant inflatable figures. The Raffles City Mall in Shenzen has a rooftop pet playground, a stage, an art display area and a sun-shaded lawn.

China’s informal economy of food stalls and sidewalk merchants is also filling the void. Although street vending has a long history in China, government officials sought to suppress it in recent years, calling it unsanitary and a throwback to pre-modern times. Now, however, they are encouraging it as a way to reduce growing unemployment, especially among young people, which currently exceeds 20%.

During my trip, I saw small-scale entrepreneurs selling produce, street food and crafts in mall parking lots and around public entrances. The distinction between public and private spaces is being reconfigured as vendors set up stalls in areas that once were open space.

Empty store spaces are also being repurposed. Some have been converted into electric vehicle showrooms, art museums and children’s play centers with dance studios, paddling pools, small skating rinks, gyms and yoga centers. Others have been redesigned as sites for art or cooking classes, or for multiplayer electronic gaming and virtual reality experiences. The Dream Time Mall in Wuhan contains an indoor snow center that offers ski lessons, ice mazes and tubing.

I see these experiments as a shift in the meaning of the mall. What began as a cathedral of retail consumerism is becoming a place where people can connect and enjoy individual and collective experiences that aren’t available online.

Some U.S. malls are moving in this direction, but China is doing it on a much larger scale. Just as former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping once asserted that his government was pursuing its own version of socialism, with “Chinese characteristics,” the U.S.-designed mall is being rewritten with Chinese characters.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article and see more than 250 UMBC articles available in The Conversation.

Meet Jennifer Herson ’99, interdisciplinary studies. Jen is an executive at Data Canopy, a data center and cloud company, and the current Vice President of Operations of the UMBC Alumni Association Board of Directors. As a board member, Jen believes deeply in the mission of UMBC and the sense of community and belonging this institution fosters. She helps perpetuate these values through her work on the board and as a donor. Take it away, Jen!

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

A: Everyone can find their people here. I wasn’t a traditional student and I didn’t choose a science-focused major, but UMBC was the absolute best choice for me as it allowed me to customize my experience and find what worked for me so that I had the confidence to follow the path that worked for me. 

Q: What’s one essential thing you’d want another Retriever to know about you?

A: My area of study was interdisciplinary studies with a focus on visual arts, English, and modern language and linguistics. In my role as an executive at Data Canopy, a data center and cloud company, I have touched everything from operations and finance to marketing. I actually use (and have always used) my degree daily. I’m a mom to a ten-year-old, an avid concert-goer/music enthusiast, and, when I’m not cheering on my son at hockey, I like to root for the Baltimore Orioles or Washington Capitals. 

Q: What’s your favorite part of being a part of Retriever Nation?

A: Being a part of Retriever Nation is a point of pride. We’re not just a little school from Baltimore County, we’re a community of people with a similar dedication to excellence–and it’s evident everywhere you see us. 

Q: What drives you to support the Alumni Endowed Scholarship Fund?

A: I love to support the Alumni Endowed Scholarship Fund. As someone who worked their way through college, the mission of that fund is near and dear to my heart. I know that the donations I make will be put to good use by a student in need. 

* * * * *

UMBC’s greatest strength is its people. When people meet Retrievers and hear about the passion they bring, the relationships they create, the ways they support each other, and the commitment they have to inclusive excellence, they truly get a sense of our community. That’s what “Meet a Retriever” is all about.

Learn more about how UMBC can help you achieve your goals.

“It is in times of great conflict and great challenge that higher education’s purpose is most revealed.”

UMBC president Valerie Sheares Ashby addressed the crowd at the 2023 winter Commencement ceremonies by acknowledging the turbulence of this past year and noting the importance of the degrees this year’s graduates received. Then nearly 1,000 Retrievers donned robes and mortarboards and made their way across the Chesapeake Employers Insurance Arena stage this week to become the latest members of the UMBC alumni community.

Representing the University System of Maryland’s Board of Regents, Anwer Hasan offered advice to the graduates saying, “As you go forward, take what you’ve learned and use it for good. Give back to the community and the world. Build that brighter future for yourselves and for others.”

Earlier this month, UMBC joined dozens of other founding institutions at the kick-off meeting of a newly launched initiative to ensure sustained resources and opportunities in tech fields for women of color.

The effort, called the Action Collaborative on Transforming Trajectories for Women of Color in Tech, is organized by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine and guided by the findings and recommendations detailed in a 2022 National Academies report. According to the report, while women of color make up a substantial and growing percentage of the female population in the United States, they earn a small percentage of computing degrees, and remain significantly underrepresented in the tech workforce.

UMBC has a history of success running programs, such the nationally recognized Meyerhoff Scholars Program and the Center for Women in Technology, that work to advance equity and inclusion and increase diversity among future leaders in science, technology, engineering, and related fields.

“Tech jobs are a vital part of our society,” says Anupam Joshi, the acting dean of the College of Engineering and Information Technology at UMBC. “We need to tap the entire talent base of the country to fill these jobs.” 

UMBC’s efforts as part of the action collaborative will be a continuation of the university’s commitment to supporting students from underrepresented groups as they pursue technical education, he says. “UMBC has a solid foundation that we can build on.”

The action collaborative will offer participating institutions—representing higher education, national laboratories, and government—a platform to exchange ideas and promising practices for increasing the recruitment, retention, and advancement in tech fields of women who identify as African American, Black, Hispanic, Latina, Native American, Asian American, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander. 

The action collaborative’s member institutions will collaborate over the coming four years to share novel, promising, and evidence-based practices, discuss and advance research priorities, share data collection practices, and more.

“This initiative will require dedication and collaboration from all of us,” said National Academy of Sciences President Marcia McNutt, in a press release. “We are committed to facilitating research, collaboration, and action that reflect the representation and lived experiences of women of color, in hopes of driving substantial change in the tech and engineering ecosystem.”

More information can be found on the action collaborative’s website.

Earlier this month, UMBC joined dozens of other founding institutions at the kick-off meeting of a newly launched initiative to ensure sustained resources and opportunities in tech fields for women of color.

The effort, called the Action Collaborative on Transforming Trajectories for Women of Color in Tech, is organized by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine and guided by the findings and recommendations detailed in a 2022 National Academies report. According to the report, while women of color make up a substantial and growing percentage of the female population in the United States, they earn a small percentage of computing degrees, and remain significantly underrepresented in the tech workforce.

UMBC has a history of success running programs, such the nationally recognized Meyerhoff Scholars Program and the Center for Women in Technology, that work to advance equity and inclusion and increase diversity among future leaders in science, technology, engineering, and related fields.

“Tech jobs are a vital part of our society,” says Anupam Joshi, the acting dean of the College of Engineering and Information Technology at UMBC. “We need to tap the entire talent base of the country to fill these jobs.” 

UMBC’s efforts as part of the action collaborative will be a continuation of the university’s commitment to supporting students from underrepresented groups as they pursue technical education, he says. “UMBC has a solid foundation that we can build on.”

The action collaborative will offer participating institutions—representing higher education, national laboratories, and government—a platform to exchange ideas and promising practices for increasing the recruitment, retention, and advancement in tech fields of women who identify as African American, Black, Hispanic, Latina, Native American, Asian American, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander. 

The action collaborative’s member institutions will collaborate over the coming four years to share novel, promising, and evidence-based practices, discuss and advance research priorities, share data collection practices, and more.

“This initiative will require dedication and collaboration from all of us,” said National Academy of Sciences President Marcia McNutt, in a press release. “We are committed to facilitating research, collaboration, and action that reflect the representation and lived experiences of women of color, in hopes of driving substantial change in the tech and engineering ecosystem.”

More information can be found on the action collaborative’s website.

Many recent artificial intelligence (AI) breakthroughs—such as smartphone tools that recognize your friends’ faces or understand your spoken commands—are based on a computing approach that was first dreamed up nearly 80 years ago. Called neural networks, the approach loosely mimics the way biological brains work. For decades, it was a quixotic idea with results that fell far short of the power of human brains. Yet starting in the early 2000s, the technique took off. What changed? In short, computers finally got fast enough (and training data plentiful enough) for neural networks to realize their hoped-for potential.

The story of neural networks illustrates a key principle in computer science: the power of any computing technique is bound by the capabilities of the hardware that runs it. Improving that hardware is a major research focus for Chenchen Liu, an assistant professor of computer science and electrical engineering at UMBC. Liu was recently awarded a prestigious NSF CAREER award totaling nearly $540,000 that will fund her efforts over the next five years to advance the next generation of powerful computer chips.

As society continues to engage with the implications of the latest commercial iterations of AI, research efforts such as Liu’s are looking ahead to an even newer wave of applications, including self-driving cars, immersive virtual reality, and AI-assisted agriculture. These new applications often require separate neural networks—for example, an image recognition system and a collision avoidance system, to share information and work together. 

Working with students and colleagues, Liu is studying how modifications to state-of-the-art AI chips could make such coordination easier.

UMBC News asked Liu about her research, the NSF CAREER award, the future of AI, and the need for responsible AI use. 

UMBC News: What are some of the main challenges holding back next-generation AI applications?

Liu: In next-gen AI applications, machines are faced with a complex composition of multiple tasks, requiring them to run multiple AI models simultaneously. And not only do the models need to run at the same time, they need to share information from one to the other. The computing needs of the models may be different. Some models may need a lot of computing power, others may need a lot of memory. It becomes very difficult to coordinate these distinct resource needs on a single computing platform and to run everything in parallel and as efficiently as possible.

UMBC News: What are some ways that you plan to tackle these challenges in your NSF CAREER-funded research?

Liu: We first need to map the interactions of the different models and understand what computing resources they need and how they work together. We then plan to investigate a novel computer chip architecture designed to support these interactions. We will look for ways to flexibly schedule tasks and allocate computing power and memory so the system can operate differently for different scenarios. Eventually, we will integrate these techniques into a comprehensive framework that could be widely applied to various next-gen AI applications.

UMBC News: What are you the most excited about in your work?

Liu: I believe an incredible increase in AI complexity will be the next big thing in the world, and I am excited to become a small part of it. The increase in complexity comes with an urgent need for novel computer architecture to support it. Since the first computer was invented, people have been trying to optimize computing performance. Now with AI, current computing resources cannot meet the requirements caused by larger and larger volumes of data. A lot of researchers are working on novel computing architectures to improve performance and I am happy to be one of them.

UMBC News: Do you see a lot of opportunities for students in the field?  

Liu: AI is changing everything in the world now. You can hear about job opportunities in Silicon Valley or with new AI start-ups nowadays, indicating a thriving new era of careers centered on AI computing. This trend is also shaping the interests of students on campus. They want to work on projects with AI components and we offer opportunities like that in many of our classes. It’s not only an opportunity for students, but also an opportunity for us to review our course development and career guidance. 

UMBC News: What do you think is the future of AI?

Liu: The overall feeling is one of awe. Just like the first word carved on stone and the first rocket launched to the sky, AI is another milestone in human history. It marks humankind’s exploration of intelligence itself, asking questions about how it is formed and how it might evolve.

We should proceed cautiously, since AI is also strong enough now to challenge human intelligence and even deceive us. Many governments have made calls to regulate it.

I believe in a few years, we will have every perspective of our world reshaped by AI, with clear impacts on the economy and society. 

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men other than skin cancer, with more than 288,000 new cases diagnosed every year, according to the American Cancer Society. The disease’s fatality rate has decreased by more than half since the 1990s, but there is still room for progress—especially in treating or preventing advanced, metastatic disease, which is much more likely to be fatal.

A new paper published in Science Advances, led by a team of UMBC researchers, clarifies how an enzyme called SMYD3 may be involved in prostate cancer’s progression to a more dangerous and aggressive stage. The enzyme’s newly confirmed role makes it a prime potential drug target for preventing metastatic disease.

Redefining an enzyme’s role

Researchers have been trying to explain SMYD3’s role in cancer since observing that it is unusually abundant in cancerous tumors, explains Erin Green, associate professor of biological sciences and senior author on the paper.

Previous studies suggested that SMYD3 acted inside a cell’s nucleus and regulated which genes the cell expressed by directly modifying DNA. But research led by Nicolas Reynoird, a scientist at the Institute for Advanced Biosciences in Grenoble, France, and a co-author on the new study, suggested a different mechanism.

In a key 2014 paper published while Reynoird was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford, he and collaborators found that SMYD3 was working outside the nucleus and activating a protein called a MAP kinase. Members of the MAP kinase protein family are overactive in cancer cells and can promote tumor growth.

The new Science Advances paper, led by Sabeen Ikram, Ph.D. ’23, biological sciences, built on Reynoird’s previous work. Ikram’s experiments showed conclusively and in more detail how SMYD3 may be triggering metastatic prostate cancer via the MAP kinase signaling pathway. The paper ties together an overabundance of SMYD3 and excessive activation of MAP kinase signaling for the first time in prostate cancer, renewing interest in SMYD3 as a therapeutic target for prostate cancer.  

The new study also revealed that SMYD3 regulates a particular protein, vimentin, that is well-studied as a marker of cancer progression. Plus, the team found for the first time that SMYD3 creates a positive feedback loop in the cell, where high levels of SMYD3 contribute to maintaining its overabundance. The study’s findings relied on experiments conducted in cell lines and in mice; the latter were led by UMBC Ph.D. student Apurv Rege.

Pioneering and independent

Today, Ikram is building on her experiences at UMBC and thriving as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford in Or Gozani’s research group. Her work on the new paper was critical to its success.

“She’s extremely motivated, focused, and was really excited about the project. She just got a lot done,” Green says. “It was a new area of research for my lab, and Sabeen was willing to be independent and pioneering in getting these different types of experiments set up and figuring out what to do.”

The positive feelings are mutual. “Dr. Green’s mentorship has helped me transform from this timid, aspiring graduate student into a confident, independent scientist today,” Ikram shares. “She never stopped believing in me, especially at the times when I didn’t.”

Ikram even took unexpected challenges during her Ph.D. journey in stride. She was thrilled to travel to France for a stint with Reynoird’s research group in January 2020. Ikram planned to return in March, but had to stay until July and couldn’t enter the lab for much of that time due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Navigating 2020 was indeed difficult for all of us, but the adverse circumstances cultivated stronger friendships and working relationships” with her French colleagues, Ikram shares.

A new direction and new hope for patients

With Ikram at Stanford, and other lab members actively at work on other projects, Green is currently seeking new team members to continue this exciting line of research—and there are many avenues to explore.

“We’ve only checked this mechanism in prostate cancer so far, but I think it’s likely happening in other cancer cell types,” Green says. “That’s another thing that we want to keep investigating: How common is this?”

Green is also excited for SMYD3’s potential use as a therapeutic target for prostate or other cancers. SMYD3 inhibitors already exist, so the new findings may encourage companies to invest in discovering new uses for them.

“There’s drugs out there that haven’t been fully explored because people decided there was not a good target.” Green says. “So there’s a lot more that could be done there.”

UMBC’s Science Learning Collaboratory buzzes with activity as small groups of students use pipettes to suck brine shrimp out of glass vials, squirt them into petri dishes set over graph paper, then stare intently at the wriggling shrimp while running stopwatches and recording data. They’ll then analyze the data using Excel and write up a laboratory report.

It may not sound like a math class, but this is a typical day in MATH 110: Math in Action, a new laboratory course for non-STEM majors who haven’t taken calculus.

The course, which launched this fall, is a UMBC innovation designed for students “who don’t generally have the most positive association with math,” says lead lab instructor Alexis O’Malley ’18, mathematics and psychology. “But personally,” she adds, “I believe everyone can benefit from some math in their life, so this course is trying to show how different math concepts are applied across various fields.”

Lara Scott, a mathematics Ph.D. student who teaches the lecture portion of the class, concurs. “The hope is that by showing students how prevalent math is in every subject,” Scott says, “they will begin to make those connections themselves and those connections will inspire them to independently wonder how certain concepts can be explained mathematically.”

Empowering students with math

Each week, the students attend Scott’s lecture, then participate in a lab session where they apply what they learned in hands-on activities. The labs are co-designed by O’Malley and a rotating cast of faculty members from departments across the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences (CNMS). As one might expect, faculty in mathematics and statistics contributed, and so did professors in biological sciences, chemistry and biochemistry, and physics, each exploring math concepts through their own discipline’s lens.   

Lab topics include progressive tax rates and mortgage interest rates, the chemistry of mixing dyes for cake icing, card and dice games to learn probability, and more. Chuck Bieberich,professor of biological sciences, co-led the brine shrimp lab, which focused on calculating distance and velocity. William R. LaCourse, dean of CNMS and professor of chemistry and biochemistry, developed a lab where the students built and used clinometers, simple mechanical devices for estimating the height of tall objects, such as trees or buildings. 

More than a year before he was teaching in MATH 110, LaCourse saw a need for a more interactive math course and began advocating for its creation. Kathleen Hoffman, professor of mathematics and associate dean in CNMS, came on board and worked with the math department to move the course forward. The resulting class is but one example of the many CNMS courses instructors have reimagined to promote active learning and engage students who otherwise might not take an interest in the natural sciences.

“Math is everywhere, and a math lab course creates opportunities for students to interact with the material in fresh, creative ways,” LaCourse says. “MATH 110 is about empowering students to make decisions and analyze situations in their daily lives—whether they’re critically evaluating statistics in the media or doubling a recipe.”

Swapping fear for fun in math class

The course is personal for O’Malley, who did not always love math herself. “I thought I was bad at it, and I hated doing things I was bad at,” she candidly recalls. “It wasn’t the math itself, it was the feeling that I had in a math class—which is how it is for a lot of people.”

A fortuitous sequence of events, including a campus job helping with professional development events for math teachers, led O’Malley from initially pursuing an English degree at UMBC to a combination of math and psychology majors as a Sherman Teacher Scholar. After that, O’Malley set out to make math courses less of a bear for her math-phobic students—and maybe even fun.

She first returned to UMBC as an adjunct professor for introductory calculus while still teaching math at Western Technical High School in Baltimore County. She now serves as a program management specialist in CNMS, and the opportunity to continue her passion—teaching math—in that role came as a delightful surprise.

Unlike calculus, where the curriculum is largely set, MATH 110 “is a growing, evolving, living course,” O’Malley says. “This lab is new and has the potential to always be new. I’m really excited about it.”

Learning to think like a mathematician

O’Malley and Scott have both witnessed substantial growth in their students this fall. Each lab report asks students to connect their work to previous labs, STEM fields, and their own lives. “That’s one of my favorite sections to read, because they always come up with examples I never would have thought of,” O’Malley says. “Sometimes they take away something that has even more depth than was my intention.”

The investigative nature of the course also supported students’ increasingly independent problem solving. Later in the semester, “Suddenly, students weren’t walking up with a blank page and asking for help, but instead explaining where they started and the specific point where they couldn’t bridge the gap on their own,” Scott shares.

As for lightbulb moments, “I wish that I had cataloged them,” O’Malley says. “But I remember their ‘aha!’ faces.”

By the end, “even in the labs where students struggled with the math, they could easily explain why and how the lab related to their life,” Scott says. “For students who won’t continue in the math field, it’s pretty incredible to watch them (sometimes begrudgingly) accept how intertwined mathematics is with our world.”

Changing minds, creating opportunities

During the last few weeks of the fall semester, rather than conducting faculty-designed labs, the students are developing their own. Next semester, the curriculum will incorporate one of the students’ labs. That process will continue, and eventually, with enough different labs to choose from, the course might become adaptable to the interests of students each semester, O’Malley says.

The spring course is filling up, which speaks to its positive reception with students. If that section fills, the college will open another. A more advanced math laboratory course is also in the early stages of development.

The new course is already opening students’ eyes to what a math class can be.

“I didn’t think you could do math and lab at the same time,” shares Taye Olorunsola ’25, management of aging services, who took a chance on the new course this fall. But now? “I recommend it to a lot of my friends.”