As a high schooler, Emily Brown ’14, M.S. ’14, computer science, dreamed of a future in STEM. Searching for a community to support her aspirations, she found the Center for Women and Technology at UMBC. Brown became a CWIT Scholar and ended up earning her bachelor’s and her master’s degrees one semester apart. After graduation, she was hired at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. This October, Brown will receive the 2025 UMBC Outstanding Alumna Award. In this Q&A, she shares how her time at UMBC—and the support she found there—helped get her to where she is today.

Q: What brought you to UMBC?

A: Initially, I was looking into other schools, but UMBC kept making its way back to the top of my list because I was looking for schools that explicitly had programs and communities for women in engineering.

Eventually, I applied for the CWIT (Center for Women and Technology) Scholars Program. As I kept coming back to UMBC for tours and meetings, I figured out this was a community that I really wanted to be a part of. At the time, Dr. Penny Rheingans was the director of the CWIT program, and hearing her talk about the program and what it would offer made UMBC one of my top two school choices. The in-state nature of UMBC meant that I would come out of school debt-free, with the kind of support that I wanted as a woman in STEM.

Q: What did you enjoy about the computer science program?  

A: I graduated from my master’s degree in the winter. I have a picture of myself and the four other people who graduated with a computer science master’s that December, and I had taken classes with all of them. At my undergraduate graduation in May, there were nine women who graduated from the computer science program. I knew all nine, which is exactly what I had attended UMBC for—to be part of a community of other women in STEM, it meant a lot to me.

Right: Emily Brown along with fellow CWIT Scholars pose to spell out CWIT.

Q: You graduated with both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in the same year. How did you decide to pursue that and is there any advice you would give another student who may consider doing the same?

A: I wasn’t sure at first that I wanted to do computer science after graduation, but by my junior year I decided to stick to a computer science career. I realized then I could either graduate early or I could start taking graduate classes with the combined B.S./M.S. program. After finishing my undergraduate degree that May, I took summer and fall classes and finished my master’s in December, and that’s how I was able to graduate twice in one year.

There are both upsides and downsides to having done that. On the upside, I started my professional career with a graduate degree, which does come with more pay and professional respect. On the downside, my computer science master’s was a general master’s degree as opposed to specialized. But this has actually proven to be useful: I started my career thinking I wanted to focus on cybersecurity and now I do more AI work and I have some graduate coursework in both of those things.

Q: Is there a faculty or staff member who helped you on your UMBC path? 

A: There are three faculty members who stand out when I think of my time at UMBC. Dr. Marie desJardins, who has since retired, was an AI and machine learning professor and the professor that I completed undergraduate research with. Her passion for teaching aligned with my desire for a community that encourages women in engineering. The undergraduate research I did with her was working on the new AP computer science curriculum for the College Board. 

Dr. desJardin’s argument was that with computer science you should submit a portfolio rather than take a test. She worked with the College Board to develop what that curriculum for submitting a portfolio would look like and I worked alongside her. My former high school computer science teacher from Howard High School was also on that team, so that was really great. My younger sister has since taken the course and I said, “Did you know I wrote that course that you’re taking in high school now?” Her response was, “I’m not telling anyone that—that’s the most embarrassing thing ever.” I thought it was very exciting.

The second professor who had a huge impact on me is Dr. Tim Oates. I found his teaching style to be one that I deeply resonated with. I always tell people, when you take a class with Dr. Oates, you need to take paper without lines because he draws a lot of pictures to explain things.

He had an example where he would walk around the classroom floor and each tile was a different square and he would say, “All right, I’m an AI, and I’m using reinforcement learning and I physically step here.” He wasn’t just lecturing, he taught by physically moving his body around the classroom. 

One example he used was if a $10 bill drops from the ceiling here, I’m incentivized as the AI to keep going back to that corner of the room, where if a $1 bill drops over there, then I know that’s not as useful of a place to go. Even if you don’t have a computer science background, you intuitively go, that makes sense. I followed him to whichever class he would teach because I knew his teaching style broke it down in a way I would deeply understand. In my final class with him, I rigged a $10 bill to drop from the ceiling because he had done this example over and over. 

The third is Dr. Anupam Joshi. He was my master’s advisor and he’s now the vice provost and chief AI officer, but at the time he was a professor teaching cybersecurity classes. He is largely the reason that I work the way I do here at the Applied Physics Laboratory. He introduced me to the type of work that got me my first job at the lab. I wrote my final research paper for my master’s degree about my APL internship experience, which was combining all of my passions.

Q: Can you share your involvement in CWIT (Center for Women in Technology), both as an alum and mentor, and what your experience was as a student? 

A: I lived in the CWIT Living Learning Community my freshman and sophomore years and then lived in an on-campus apartment with other CWIT students. I met my best friends in the CWIT program. We had a CWIT alum virtual happy hour during the pandemic, and I think there were a number of us who said, “I walked into that CWIT office and just cried and then walked out and passed my classes because there was that kind of support for me.”

I have been involved as an alum since day one. After undergrad, I participated in the career fairs and networking dinners with the talent services recruiting department from APL. 

I’ve done industry mentoring nearly every year for the past six years. When I was a CWIT student, my industry mentor was from Lockheed Martin. She did a mock interview with me where she asked me the same questions she would ask a candidate interviewing for their summer internship. She then brought me on a Friday afternoon to the Lockheed Martin office facilities for a lab tour. Those two things were both extremely memorable to me, and I carried that forward with my mentees, some of whom then got internships at APL. That was the experience I sought to replicate and produce for my CWIT mentees.

Q: Can you tell me a little bit more about your current job at APL? What do you enjoy most about it? 

A: I’m currently the assistant group supervisor for the analytic capabilities group. The group is really known for a space at APL called the Live Lab, which was started as a response to a 2009 cyber attack that APL was victim of. The lab watches cyber data coming into the lab and processes it in real time to try to be more proactive about the next attack. I actually toured the Live Lab as part of a CWIT Scholars and Cyber Scholars visit day my senior year and thought to myself, ”This place is really cool. I would really like to work there someday.” The staff member running the tour that I attended was Dr. Elisha Peterson, who is my direct boss now. It took a while, but I made it to where I wanted to work my senior year of undergrad.

I’m so proud of UMBC. Being recognized as someone who UMBC is proud of also is incredible.

Emily Brown ’14, M.S. ’14, computer science

Q: How did your UMBC degree help prepare you for your professional career?

A: It wasn’t just what I learned at UMBC that was valuable, but how I learned how to learn. I came into my career already knowing that I valued community and diversity of thought because I had valued it and been taught to value it from my time at UMBC. 

UMBC also prepared me to anticipate that there are things that will be interdisciplinary in nature [in my career]. I was able to quickly understand at APL that the value of interdisciplinary teams is really important.

For example, I’ve worked with a psychologist colleague on the concept of a moral foundation. There is, of course, a computing component to parsing out the information, but there’s also a psychological component: Why does this message resonate with you, but not with me? Everybody has their own semi-unique moral foundations profile and a message that aligns to your moral foundations is more likely to resonate with you. That’s something I didn’t study in my computer science coursework at UMBC and I do need to make sure that I’m taking my psychologist colleagues’ opinions and thoughts about this into account as we’re building a project.

Q: What does winning a UMBC Alumni Award mean to you?

A: My sister, who I already mentioned finds me embarrassing, has told me in the past, “You know, there’s such a thing as too much school spirit.” And I refuse to believe that. Having been given so much by UMBC and being so passionate about what I experienced in that circle on that campus, I’m so proud of UMBC. Being recognized as someone who UMBC is proud of also is incredible.

Left: Emily Brown with her younger sister at Homecoming.

Q: If you could give one piece of advice to a current UMBC student, what would it be?

A: Try to do something different. I got a computer science degree, but I was also on The Retriever Weekly editorial staff, which for a CS major was super unusual. But that was my something different. I can’t tell you how many times I have been told in my professional career, “Wow, finding an engineer who is a decent writer is rare.” But that’s because I was on a student newspaper in undergrad. That ability to communicate has taken me pretty far in my career.

Mark your calendars for the 2025 Alumni Awards on Wednesday, October 29,at 6 p.m., and consider joining the UMBC community at the Chesapeake Employers Insurance Arena to celebrate Emily Brown and the many remarkable individuals receiving awards. The event will be livestreamed for those unable to join in person. You can learn more at alumni.umbc.edu/alumniawards.