A nine-year-old stands at the mouth of a coal mine covered in coal dust, wearing a small headlamp. A woman holds her baby on her lap as she packs boxes in a warehouse along with her 5-, 8-, and 12-year-olds. These are just two of thousands of evocative black-and white historical photographs handled by Special Collections interns Meredith Power ’21, history, a public history graduate student, and Gabe Morrison ’23, anthropology. Along with library staff members, these two worked diligently to ensure that the images of the families and children who lived through these harrowing work conditions are accessible to the public for research and learning.

Fine motor skills

“Photos from the early 1900s were developed on fine photographic paper that is prone to crinkling around the edges, ripping, and fading,” Power says. Wearing blue nitrile medical gloves, they rehouse photos from their cellophane sleeves to museum-grade mylar sleeves, keeping them from further discoloration, tears, wrinkles, and sticking to the sleeves.

“They’re very delicate,” Power says. “You need good eye-hand coordination to pick up the photos from the corners, remove them from whatever packaging they are in, and slide them into the mylar sleeve.”

This process is second nature for Morrison, who has been working at Special Collections for over a year. He has worked with securing the Lewis Hine photos as part of his public humanities minor, as well as the Maryland Folklife Program Collection, the Coslet-Sapienza Fantasy and Science Fiction Fanzine Collection, and the George Cruikshank illustrations and papers.

“I had to learn how to properly handle photographs and manuscripts and how to catalog them according to the Library of Congress classification system,” Morrison says. For both Power and Morrison, developing greater patience and manual dexterity and embracing working through hundreds of documents alone in a quiet space surrounded by stacks of materials was well worth the effort to broaden access to these historic documents.

“The value of this project is ensuring people understand that this resource exists,” says Power, “to help these photos live beyond a heavily controlled and restricted space on campus into a digital space where more people are able to access the information.”

Digital accessibility

Protecting delicate, historic documents includes digitizing them. The digitizing process is another lesson in precision and patience. Power begins the process by taking a photo out of the mylar sleeve—making sure to only touch the corners—along with a small rectangular white piece of paper describing the photo. They gently place the photo underneath a camera, delicately straightening the image before the camera snaps the picture and sends it to a computer where Power edits it using Adobe Lightroom.

“It’s an elaborate setup with lights at 45-degree angles, and the camera pointed straight down at a small white stand where I place the image,” explains Power, who would work on digitizing for six to eight hours at a time. “Once I take the image, I edit the size and angle of the photo. The metadata is then added into an Excel spreadsheet, which includes noting if there was a corner missing or if the photo had adhesive stuck to it.”

Digitizing rare books, something Morrison has spent months working on, requires using a special book scanning machine with raised sides, like hands cradling the book open, and small snakelike bean bag weights to keep the pages flat without using his fingers. “I make sure I’m not blocking any text or any important image. And then I press a button, flip a page, press a button, flip a page for hours on end until I finish digitizing that book,” Morrison says, smiling. “So, it’s not the most exciting work, but I find digitization specifically important because it’s a process that helps preserve documents too fragile to be in public circulation. Digitally, you can share it with a broader audience.”

Workforce skills

Both Power and Morrison brought many special collections skills to their public humanities internships. Archaeology camp inspired Morrison to learn about how to study and take care of important and fragile objects. He worked at the Montgomery Parks Archeology Program throughout high school, where he met a friend who introduced him to UMBC’s Special Collections. “I’ve always had an interest in historic things, in the preservation of artifacts,” Morrison says, who plans to apply to a master’s program in library and museum studies after graduation. “I think Special Collections has helped me realize I want to do archival work.”

Power found their footing working full time in the conservation rooms at Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum. “I was the administrative assistant in the Conservation Division and was around a lot of conversations on handling art objects and special collections materials, but I did not work with the materials directly,” says Power. “Working with the Hine Collection was a great opportunity for hands-on experience working with physical items and digitization.” These skills have also come in handy for Power, whose master’s degree focuses on 14th-century religious women hermits in Yorkshire, England. In 2022, Power had the opportunity to visit parish archives in Yorkshire to read through medieval-primary source documents. 

For Power, history isn’t just books, dates, and lists of events. They say that there are a lot of living materials out there, whether that’s parish churches or photographs from the early 20th century, like the Hine collection. There is a connection between public history work and the people who lived before us. “It’s important to continue to help students remember that history is not dead and dusty. It’s alive,” says Power. They feel that the connection element is essential, and sometimes it gets lost. “Special Collections prove that these events really happened. They can inspire students to visit those places. To stand in that space where it happened and say, ‘Yeah, I was here too.’ I love that.”

Starting this May, a series of wildfires in Eastern Canada sent enormous smoke clouds wafting into the U.S., triggering air quality warnings in cities from the Midwest to the Northeast. For days, orange skies backdropped landscapes clouded by acrid air. People who could hunkered inside with the doors and windows shut. Those who had to go out faced itchy eyes, burning throats, and worse.

As a resident of the Baltimore area—which was blanketed with particularly bad smoke in both early and late June—UMBC Professor Chris Hennigan looked at the haze with dismay. But as an environmental engineer who studies air pollution, he had an additional thought: “We were looking at the air quality forecasts, and we thought ‘We have to gather data,’” he says.

The public found many colorful words to describe the summer’s unwanted smoke: brutal, eerie, dystopian.

Hennigan and his team have been working to put numbers to the adjectives. On the roof of the engineering building, the researchers installed a squat, white sensor that monitors the levels of tiny particles in the air, particularly those measuring 2.5 micrometers in diameter or less—smaller than most bacteria. Called PM_2.5, these particles are released in large numbers during fires. They are dangerous to human health because they can work their way into the deepest parts of the lungs and even enter the bloodstream.

The sensor showed huge spikes in PM_2.5 when the smoke blew through, on some days reaching levels considered unhealthy for anyone to breathe.

The researchers also set up equipment to filter particles out of the air. After 24 hours, they collected the filters, which they are storing, neatly labeled, in a refrigerator in Hennigan’s lab.

The filtered samples will advance at least two ongoing investigations, Hennigan says. In one avenue of inquiry, Joel Tyson, Ph.D. ’23, biochemical engineering, is studying how tiny particles can harm human lung cells. Before this year’s smoky summer, Tyson had been studying the toxic effects of particulate matter normally found in the Baltimore air. With the new smoke samples, he will start to investigate whether wildfire smoke particles, per unit, are more toxic than regular urban particulate matter, which comes from sources such as cars and power plants. Some studies have indicated that wildfire particulate matter is indeed more toxic, but more research is needed before any definitive conclusions can be reached.

In another line of research, Hennigan is also studying how particles in the air, including from smoke, may affect the climate. Undergraduate chemical engineering students Danielle Larios ’25 and Luis Rodriguez ’25 are assisting in the investigations.

The researchers study how particles of brown-colored carbon-containing material absorb light. Burning vegetation sends large amounts of this brown carbon into the atmosphere. It’s possible that the particles are trapping significant heat from the sun, accelerating the pace of planetary warming. Such effects are not normally included in global climate models, and better understanding of the process could improve humanity’s ability to predict, and manage, the coming years of climate upheaval.

Climate change and wildfires are intimately linked. This summer was not only smoky, but also scorching. July marked the hottest month ever recorded, and scientists predict that as the world continues to warm, wildfires will continue to increase in quantity and intensity. “Smokeageddon,” as headlines put it, may become the new normal.

Hennigan says recent research illuminates how much wildfire smoke has contributed to air pollution trends. He points to a paper published in September in the scientific journal Nature that estimated that since 2016, wildfire smoke in the contiguous United States has undone around 25% of the progress in air quality made between 2000 and 2016.

For the researchers in Hennigan’s lab, those effects have been felt personally. 

Rodriguez recalled how in June he had to go out to buy a fresh pack of N95 masks. “The smoke was just awful,” he says. Larios says she felt a burning at the back of her throat in just 15 minutes walking to her car.

For Tyson, the effects of the smoke were so bad that at one point he struggled to breathe and had to visit the doctor. The episode, he says, drove home the importance of his toxicology research.

All three note both the complexity of the systems they are studying and the importance of discovering new knowledge that might help society handle the environmental challenges it faces.

“Our work can have real-world impact, and that’s exciting,” says Larios.

Sebastian Deffner, associate professor of physics, attended “Quantum Science and Technology: Recent Advances and New Perspectives,” a workshop hosted by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in Vatican City from November 30 to December 2. Deffner was among only about 70 global experts invited to the workshop, and the guest list included numerous Nobel laureates.  

“The leading experts in quantum science met in a unique place for a unique workshop to discuss the past, present, and future of quantum technologies,” Deffner says of the workshop.

For Deffner, it was an exciting and rare opportunity. The invitation recognizes his leadership role in developing the young field of quantum thermodynamics on an international scale. In 2019, he co-authored the first textbook focused on the subject, and his research group consistently contributes to the research literature.

Recordings of talks from the workshop are available here.

Members of UMBC’s chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) traveled to Norfolk, Virginia for their annual regional conference in November and came home with numerous awards. 

The UMBC team defeated Carnegie Mellon University and North Carolina State University to win the Tech Bowl competition, a Jeopardy-style game that tests teams’ knowledge of fundamental engineering principles. UMBC also claimed first through third place in the research poster presentation contest, which involved a 10-minute technical research talk followed by questions from the judges and audience.

The team relied on prior knowledge to excel in the Tech Bowl, only having decided to participate upon arriving at the conference. “It was really exciting getting so many questions right with our only practice being from our coursework,” shares UMBC NSBE chapter president Nelanne Bolima ’24, chemical engineering. “That just goes to show how well UMBC’s College of Engineering and IT prepares students to succeed.”

In addition to Bolima, the Tech Bowl team members included Kayla Magruder ’26, chemical engineering; Saleem Lawal ’25, computer science; and Daniel Williams ’24, computer science. Presentation winners were Williams (first), Bolima (second), and Christopher Appiah ’24, mechanical engineering (third). Keith Harmon, director of the UMBC Meyerhoff Scholars Program, serves as the chapter advisor.

“We are so proud of the UMBC NSBE Chapter,” Harmon shares. “They do tremendous work supporting UMBC STEM majors and offering service impacting youth in the Baltimore-Washington corridor.”

Students supporting students

NSBE is a completely student-run organization, creating leadership opportunities for hundreds of students across the country. UMBC’s NSBE chapter supports members through activities such as mentoring initiatives, conference preparation, networking opportunities, and leadership development programming. The chapter also focuses on community outreach, such as visiting high schools, collaborating with non-profits, and welcoming younger students to shadow the chapter’s board meetings.  

“I have benefitted from being a member of this team by gaining invaluable public speaking and collaboration skills,” Appiah shares. “I learned how to effectively present, detailing the broader impact of research I have done.” Appiah conducts research with Ankit Goel, assistant professor of mechanical engineering. Goel’s group works on complex applications of control theory in robotics and autonomous systems. 

For Jaden Somerville ’25, mechanical engineering, “the competition not only improved my technical skills, but also taught me teamwork, problem-solving, and effective time management.”

In March 2024, the chapter will take its talents to the 50th annual NSBE convention in Atlanta, Georgia. 

Sonya Squires-Caesar, a doctoral candidate in UMBC’s language, literacy, and culture program, has been interviewing communities who use susus to save money for big-ticket items like homes, farms, or everyday needs like transportation and bills. Susu, a word thought to come linguistically from West African languages, is an informal structure of communal savings where individuals agree to give an equal amount of money to one pool. Members then decide the frequency of when someone receives the entire amount.

“I remember my mother planning her spending around when she would get her payment,” says Squires-Caesar, whose family is from Barbados. Squires-Caesar explains that susus—or rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs)—can be a way for people to access larger sums of money without the barriers formal banks and finance systems pose to people without high levels of disposable income.

“While there is a significant body of ROSCA research, it tends to focus on groups living in poverty or with minimal or no access to formal financial instruments,” says Squires-Caesar. “My study differs by focusing on middle-class and upper-middle-class immigrants who opt to use this informal, unregulated financial tool in the U.S. alongside mainstream financial services such as banks, credit cards, investments, etc.”

Squires-Caesar, the Dresher Center for the Humanities’ graduate student research fellow for fall 2023, is interested in studying the evolution of susus from the transatlantic slave trade to today. She explains that for centuries people have pooled their resources for individual and communal needs. 

Honoring African indigenous knowledge

Susus are a cultural practice rooted in African indigenous knowledge, a term for how various African cultures orally passed a range of information, customs, and beliefs from generation to generation. “In African indigenous knowledge, the act of learning is thought to be a fully engaged journey to ‘find one’s face,’” says Squires-Caesar, “which is considered the path to discovering your roots, revealing your spirit, and determining the ‘fire in your belly’ or core elements that matter most to you.”

Squires-Caesar “found her face” when she aligned her research path with her authentic identity. “Western research methods couldn’t guide mine. I felt I was trying to fit a square peg into a circle,” explains Squires-Caesar. “I found my face when I realized the methodology that my project needed had to model the community I was looking to understand.”

Researching what’s below the surface

Squires-Caesar’s approach to understanding financial literacy is less about the stock market and credit and more about what is intangible. She calls it the iceberg effect.

“On top of the iceberg are tangible things like bank accounts and credit cards,” explains Squires-Caesar. “You can see, touch, feel, and measure them, but beneath the iceberg are the processes that may not have official rules and regulations and where the general public may not know they are happening, like susus.” 

During the four years she managed a community college financial literacy program, Squires-Caesar met many students surviving from month to month. Through ethnographic research, she found students were using non-traditional ways to make ends meet, like getting cash advances from bingo halls to pay for bills and groceries. The data also showed that some students were overwhelmed by the idea of saving.

To shift that thinking, she created a microsavings project for her students to take them through the process of saving—a few cents here, a few dollars there, which grows over time. 

These stories about the complexities of susu communities have inspired Squires- Caesar, as part of her Dresher Fellowship, to decorate physical masks as three-dimensional representations of financial identity, of “finding face.”

Renique Kersh became UMBC’s vice president for student affairs in August 2023, and her first days were a whirlwind that included dropping her sons at school, moving from Boston to Maryland, and attending a number of UMBC welcome events for students and the community.

Now that she’s had the chance to replant her roots at UMBC (her first job out of graduate school was as a community director for Residential Life from 2001 – 2003), Kersh is using her time to listen to the community and bring her expertise to the table as she works with campus leadership and partners to support student success and well-being.

Her excitement and eagerness to be here is evident in the way she enthusiastically talks about UMBC students, staff, faculty, alumni, and families—and the work ahead.

UMBC Magazine: What has excited you the most about being at UMBC so far?

The students! One of the most exciting parts of my interview process was meeting students in person. I appreciate how humble they are and how seriously they take the privilege of being here and caring for our community.

I’ve also loved meeting and hearing from staff and faculty across campus. It’s a phenomenal group with a lot of spirit, energy, and commitment to the university and creating opportunities for students. 

Some people have heard me say this already, but it’s true: When we moved from Boston and crossed the border into Maryland, I immediately felt a sense of home. I do believe that this is my home, and it’s where my heart has been for many years. I wake up every morning thankful to be part of such a supportive campus environment.

I’m also honored and humbled to work for a president who is a dynamic leader who deeply appreciates UMBC’s history and is committed to taking the university to the next level. I’m excited to be part of that work too.

I’m grateful for the alumni who have welcomed me, and I look forward to additional opportunities to engage with them and hear about their experiences as students here. I would love to bring alumni who were student leaders during their time here to meet with our current student leaders.

UMBC Magazine: What are your initial goals to connect and support students and the campus—now and future? What is the importance of campus partnerships in student affairs?

I’ve been doing a lot of listening, and I hear five areas where we need to grow: belonging; staff well-being and capacity; space; structure; and synergy. I want to build priorities around what I am hearing.

We are a diverse community but we still need to pay attention to how students feel welcome. Our demographics are changing quickly and as part of our commitment to inclusive excellence we need to have the infrastructure to support the diverse student body. The goal of the Division of Student Affairs is to support and engage both undergraduate and graduate students. To do that fully we need to engage in some difficult conversations in order to build community, while honoring differences and similarities between the two.

We are in need of additional space to support students, staff, and faculty. The pandemic has changed how we use space, and we need to consider these changes and look at how we can use space. We need to find more spaces where students can gather together in the ways we hope for them. 

Partnerships across our division and campus are key. We do work better together. Together we can address capacity and efficiency so that students are successful. This includes technology to evaluate success, communication structures, and bringing academics together with co-curricular engagement experiences.

Over the course of my career, I’ve spent a great deal of time in student affairs, and a long time on the academic side of universities as well. Both areas show a care and concern for student success, but sometimes barriers build up between the two. This work cannot be done in silos, and I’m committed to finding the connection points and focusing on ways we can work together. 

UMBC Magazine: How do we support students in challenging times? 

It’s really important to listen to students and not impose our way of being on them. What do they need? Often, the first things they begin to share with us don’t give us an immediate sense of what they are feeling or need; we have to keep listening and encourage them to tell their story before we respond. What is their concern a symptom of, and how do we diagnose it? 

Being present with students also calls for humility and understanding our limitations. Answers aren’t always simple. We have to look at the support systems we offer, and if they don’t have the impact we are hoping for, we may need to change how we do things or consider new ways of doing them. 

The mental health crisis is ongoing, so we need to think creatively about what we offer students. That may mean going beyond care appointments to, for example, pop-up spaces with resources and trained facilitators. We know this crisis calls for a major shift in how universities approach this work and that there’s also an impact on faculty and staff, who may struggle to know how to help students while dealing with their own challenges. Sometimes it calls for difficult discussions about students and their responsibility as a member of this community and how they can support themselves and others.

UMBC Magazine: As you began your vice president’s role, you also traveled to Germany in October as part of your Fulbright Administrators Award. What did you learn from the experience?

The experience was transformative both personally and professionally, and I was honored to be one of the 15 leaders chosen from across the country. 

First of all, everyone in my group shared their schools’ challenges with equity issues. While our educational systems and our assessment methods are different, we had important conversations and struggled with the idea of trying to change a system that has been in place for quite some time.

I learned that administrators from Germany traveled to Kentucky as part of their Fulbright, and they were shocked by our standard of care. They shared that the level of support and guidance we provide seems excessive and indicated that in Germany the philosophy is that when students turn 18 they are adults who can navigate institutions on their own.

Our conversations led us to discussions about what we can learn from Germans about giving students more space to figure things out and what they can learn from us about meeting students where they are and considering the standard of care that may be needed at each stage of development. In the future, I would love to teach a comparative analysis class and take students to Germany to learn more about their approach to education and care.

In reflecting back, I see the Fulbright as a seed for me and my work, but also an opportunity for my sons to see what is possible for them, too.

UMBC Magazine: In 2022 you were also selected to be an Aspen Institute Senior Impact Fellow. What were the outcomes of this program?

What I loved about this fellowship is that it’s an intergenerational program, so there were leaders in high school and college up to university presidents. We discussed our perspectives on what leadership means and how to create opportunities for experiential equity for students. Some of the things children engage in or are responsible for can be examples of leadership, but are not traditionally acknowledged as such. How do we capture that and provide more resources and support for them? 

As part of my fellowship, I co-authored a report focused on the advancement of youth leadership development opportunities. “Advancing Youth Development Leadership Research,” was published in October 2023 under the new name of the organization that spun off of Aspen, The Center for Expanding Leadership and Opportunity, along with an additional report on “The Future of Youth Leadership Development Practice.”  

UMBC Magazine: As a leader, how important is self care to you and how do you practice it? 

My doctoral research focused on the relationship between stress and the health risks for women leaders in higher education. It’s real, and the more responsibility women have as leaders the more unhealthy they become. This really spoke to me, and as I grow as a leader I’ve never forgotten it. I have to remind myself to take time for me, that no one else will do that for me. For me, this means personal retreats focused on what I need at the time, whether it’s space to think and write or just a relaxing getaway.

In the day-to-day, I love Peloton, and I just started shadowboxing! I also love spending time in community with family and friends.

Interview by Eleanor Lewis

After 18 months of intensive design work by a team of more than 100 scientists, which followed years of preliminary work and investment, in November the scientists and engineers on the Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite (AXIS) science team took an important step toward delivering this next-generation space telescope. They became one of 10 teams to submit their formal project proposal to NASA, requesting nearly $1 billion in funding to further develop the design and build the telescope. 

Adi Foord, assistant professor of physics, and Eileen Meyer, associate professor of physics, serve on the central AXIS leadership team, and Foord co-leads the sub-team focused on supermassive black hole evolution. If selected for production, AXIS will improve upon the highly successful, but aging, Chandra X-ray Observatory launched in 1999. 

As an X-ray telescope, AXIS aligns with one of the established priorities laid out in NASA’s 2020 decadal survey. These surveys initiate a years-long competition to be the one major instrument eventually selected for launch to address one of the priorities. 

A revolutionary x-ray telescope

“AXIS is going to revolutionize our understanding of supermassive black hole growth and evolution by detecting some of the earliest known supermassive black holes to date and tracking them across cosmic time,” Foord says. “AXIS will be the premiere high-angular-resolution X-ray mission of the 2030s, observing deeper into our universe than currently possible with existing X-ray telescopes.”

The lead investigator on the AXIS team is Chris Reynolds at University of Maryland, College Park, and the co-lead is Erin Kara at MIT. The team will know by fall 2024 if its proposal is one of two or three selected to move on to the next phase. After that, one proposal will eventually emerge the winner, and the selected team will build their satellite for launch in the early 2030s. 

The team is optimistic about their prospects, given the strength of the proposal and the potential impact of the new satellite’s capabilities. AXIS’ “superb resolution means that it will be able to detect many new systems of interacting supermassive black holes,” Foord explains, such as pairs orbiting each other very closely and expected to merge. “We currently don’t know of too many of these systems, and AXIS is predicted to find hundreds to thousands of them.”

When LeBron James comes calling, you answer the phone. Philip Knowlton ’03, visual arts, knows this better than most.

The NBA legend doesn’t have the UMBC alum in his contacts because Knowlton is great at one-on-one (probably). Instead, Knowlton has collaborated with James’ media company Uninterrupted on several documentaries as a director, editor, producer, and director of photography. Uninterrupted was founded to empower athletes to tell their stories in their own words. This time, Knowlton was called upon to direct and co-executive produce Redefined: J.R. Smith, a four-part Prime Video documentary series released in April 2023 that follows J.R. Smith, a retired two-time NBA champion, as he navigates a new challenge—college.

“This is the story of him post-NBA as he decides to go to college at North Carolina A&T [State University] to pursue a degree but also to try out for the Aggies golf team,” explains Knowlton.

Student-athlete turned filmmaker

“It was just a really inspiring project to be a part of,” says Knowlton, who made his first sports documentary about UMBC track and field when he was a student-athlete on the team. Having played (and won championships) with James on both the Cleveland Cavaliers and Los Angeles Lakers, Smith became good friends with James. So, when Smith made the decision to pack his book bag, head to college, and try out for the golf team, his team connected with Uninterrupted to see about interest in a possible film project.

“Of course they were on board,” says Knowlton, who received the call from Uninterrupted soon after. “They asked me if I’d be interested in flying to Greensboro to film a sizzle.” In the film world, a sizzle is like a demo—a short trailer used to pitch the story to networks.

Knowlton jumped at the opportunity to once again work with Uninterrupted.

“I think what they really like about me is that I’m able to direct and shoot,” says Knowlton. “It keeps the team smaller and more intimate. So, you’re able to be in places that a big crew may not be able to get into. Or athletes may not want a whole big team following them around.” 

Knowlton worked with the team at Uninterrupted to put together a treatment and map out the story they wanted to tell. Then, he hopped on a plane to Greensboro and filmed the sizzle.

“Next, we took meetings with everyone like HBO Max, ESPN+, Amazon—all of them,” explains Knowlton. “There was interest from quite a few networks, but it ultimately landed on Prime Video.” 

By this point, Smith was just about two or three weeks out from starting school. So, Knowlton had to move quickly. “This production, specifically, was really dictated by Smith’s golf season and his school year,” says Knowlton. The team made it in time to film the first couple days of school and practice. Then, they returned every month or two for different milestones throughout Smith’s first year, like his first tournament and A&T’s homecoming celebration. 

“It was amazing to see J.R., who could have retired and moved to Miami to hang out by the pool, want to go to college for the first time and push himself,” says Knowlton.

Find a place that let’s you do both

Of course, this story starts way before Smith decided to trade basketballs for golf balls. This story starts at a still-burgeoning university in Baltimore County, Maryland.

“I was looking for a school where I could run cross country that also had a good video or digital art program,” explains Knowlton, who now owns and operates Opposit, a creative studio he founded in 2018 specializing in original documentary film content. “A lot of schools have one or the other but not both.” UMBC gave Knowlton the opportunity to explore both.

“It was kind of a no-brainer,” admits Knowlton, who received an athletic scholarship to run on the cross country and track and field teams while pursuing his B.A. in imaging and digital arts. “That program was perfect in that it let me experiment in a lot of different art forms.”

Throughout college, Knowlton was still trying to find his passion. He knew he loved visual arts but was unsure where to focus his energy. He enjoyed photography, graphic design, and film. It wasn’t until Vin Grabill’s video art class that it all started to click.

“I taught students that video could be seen as a kind of ‘painting in time.’ Utilizing video edits as brushstrokes, students created short rhythmic works that brought impact to their source material,” explains Grabill, associate professor emeritus in UMBC’s Department of Visual Arts. “Phil’s exercises exemplified these goals, eventually leading to final projects where narrative content was successfully built around a solid rhythmic structure. I’m very happy to see Phil pushing his work forward 20 years later!”

“Today, when I do Q&As about my films, I like to quote [basketball coach] Jim Valvano, who said, ‘Every single day, in every walk of life, ordinary people do extraordinary things,’” says Knowlton. “When I work on documentaries, a lot of the time I am filming everyday people doing amazing things. But J.R.’s story almost feels like the reverse. He’s this extraordinary person doing something more ordinary—going to college. To have been a part of J.R.’s journey and help share with the world has been a great experience.”

UMBC is continuing its commitment to diversifying Maryland’s biomedical and life sciences ecosystem through its latest collaborative effort with the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) to develop a new life sciences accelerator program focused on faculty development and research commercialization efforts. 

UMBC and UMB were jointly awarded a four-year, $4 million Research Evaluation and Commercialization Hubs (REACH) grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to advance the biomedical entrepreneurship and innovation economy in the Baltimore region. This grant will be used to build on the work that began when UMBC and the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) received a $13 million NIH Common Fund Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST) grant in 2022 to enhance recruitment and training of junior faculty from groups underrepresented in biomedical science.

“We have a long-term commitment to enhance the diversity of the faculty on our two campuses in the biomedical and life sciences,” says Karl V. Steiner, UMBC’s vice president of research and creative achievement and co-principal investigator of the new REACH grant. “We are pleased to further strengthen the close partnership with our colleagues at UMB and beyond with this next initiative.”

Building a life sciences accelerator program

The REACH grant will fund up to 44 early-career faculty and students from UMBC and UMB (11 each year) with up to $100,000 each to develop and test commercially-promising biomedical and life science technologies. Additionally, UMB will use a portion of the grant funding to create the University of Maryland, Baltimore Life Science Discovery (UM-BILD) Accelerator Program’s “proof-of-concept” hub that will be housed at the University of Maryland BioPark and at the bwtech@UMBC Research and Technology Park. The UM-BILD hub, set to launch next year, is one of only five REACH hubs awarded funding across the nation. 

Aaron Miscenich, executive director of bwtech@UMBC, explains that bwtech@UMBC has done extensive work in developing a strong community centered around entrepreneurship and technology commercialization. 

“UMBC’s partnership with UMB to create this technology commercialization hub will [further] enhance our work and bring additional support to UMBC’s research community,” Miscenich says. “It’s a great opportunity to bring together UMBC faculty and students with resources that can help further develop promising technologies and help them to grow into thriving businesses.”

UMSOM’s Jason Rose, principal investigator of the REACH grant, shared how both institutions plan to support the biotech entrepreneurs who take part in the accelerator program. 

“We recognize that to create our own unique cohort of newly trained biotech entrepreneurs here in Baltimore, our accelerator will need to provide them with both research support and funding, as well as guidance through the process of commercialization and technology development,” Rose said in a UMSOM press release. “We will be providing mentoring and educational programs from a diverse set of successful life science innovators and leaders to help distill their broad experiences—from navigating FDA regulatory pathways to financing new companies—to all of those who interact with the hub.” 

This initiative, Steiner adds, aims to increase the number of Black and Latinx entrepreneurs in the biomedical and life sciences.

“As we look at the makeup of entrepreneurs across our communities, it’s obvious that we are under-serving those underserved communities. This will be yet another building block in our joint commitment to ensure that we focus on and benefit from the breadth of entrepreneurial talent in Maryland,” says Steiner. “We’re looking to bring in more individuals from underrepresented communities into the faculty ranks and actively help them develop a strong network of peers and mentors to allow them to successfully build their careers and their businesses in Maryland, with support from UMBC with bwtech and support from UMB.”

UMBC President Valerie Sheares Ashby shares that “we are excited to work together to create opportunities for everyone to benefit from and contribute to this innovation ecosystem, staying true to our long-held commitment to inclusive excellence.” 

Commercialization efforts at UMBC

Wendy Martin, director of UMBC’s Office of Technology Development, will assist in selecting and managing the projects that will be funded through the REACH grant. Martin has worked closely with faculty in all aspects of intellectual property protection and commercialization, including helping faculty to receive internal and external funding to develop new products. Those funding opportunities have included UMBC’s long-standing partnership with TEDCO’s Maryland Innovation Initiative (MII), which will also be a collaborator of the UM-BILD accelerator along with the University of Maryland, College Park, Morgan State University, and Blackbird Laboratories.

Since launching in 2012, MII has supported 39 UMBC faculty in their commercialization pursuits, including the development of bendable zinc-based batteries and vibration-powered sensor technology for wind turbines. 

“I’m excited that we can bring everyone to the table. UMBC provides a continuum of support for these commercialization projects,” says Martin. “We’re building on enhancing things that we’re already doing. It’s great that we will have these additional resources to keep it going and to do it better.”