Chad Cradock knows a little something about commitment.
Each weekday morning he arrives at the UMBC Natatorium at 6:30 a.m. ready to lead the first of two team practices of the day. Each evening the 1997 psychology grad goes home to his wife and three small children.
In between, he devotes himself to UMBC, not only as the university’s championship swimming and diving coach, but as an alumnus and donor — and someone who understands how it takes the efforts of the entire team to make things happen.
“As we continue to win more and more, it’s important that we not take it for granted,” said Chad, who each year works with his student-athletes on letter-writing campaigns to raise money for everything from the team’s new record board to new uniforms. “My old coach said, ‘don’t rest on your laurels.’ We always have to look to the future.”
Originally from Barrie, Ontario, Chad came to UMBC on a swimming and diving scholarship. He enjoyed a stellar career from 1993 to 1997, after which he immediately was named assistant coach of his former team. In 2001 he became the second head coach of the program, winning nine consecutive conference championships, including seven straight America East titles, while the women have won four conference crowns.
He was named to UMBC Athletics’ Hall of Fame in 2004 and Chad and his staff have been named Coach and Coaching Staff of the Year six times, as well, including being named 2010 America East Coaching Staff of the Year. He is also the 2010 Outstanding Alumnus of the Year for the Social and Behavioral Sciences, as named by the UMBC Alumni Association.
Besides the hard work with his student-athletes — whose grades are outstanding, he says with pride — Chad is an outspoken advocate for giving back. As he sees it, supporting UMBC is a way of showing his pride in a place that made a major impact in his life — both as an athlete and as a student — and a way of investing in students who will benefit for years to come.
“I’m still close with my teammates, and most of them are donors, too, because I think we all had such a good experience here,” he said.
“I have every reason to give. My athletes deserve my support, my program deserves my support and the University deserves it. I don’t know what my life would be like without UMBC.”

Chad Cradock knows a little something about commitment.

Each weekday morning he arrives at the UMBC Natatorium at 6:30 a.m. ready to lead the first of two team practices of the day. Each evening the 1997 psychology grad goes home to his wife and three small children.

In between, he devotes himself to UMBC, not only as the university’s championship swimming and diving coach, but as an alumnus and donor — and someone who understands how it takes the efforts of the entire team to make things happen.

“As we continue to win more and more, it’s important that we not take it for granted,” said Chad, who each year works with his student-athletes on letter-writing campaigns to raise money for everything from the team’s new record board to new uniforms. “My old coach said, ‘don’t rest on your laurels.’ We always have to look to the future.”

Originally from Barrie, Ontario, Chad came to UMBC on a swimming and diving scholarship. He enjoyed a stellar career from 1993 to 1997, after which he immediately was named assistant coach of his former team. In 2001 he became the second head coach of the program, winning nine consecutive conference championships, including seven straight America East titles, while the women have won four conference crowns.

He was named to UMBC Athletics’ Hall of Fame in 2004 and Chad and his staff have been named Coach and Coaching Staff of the Year six times, as well, including being named 2010 America East Coaching Staff of the Year. He is also the 2010 Outstanding Alumnus of the Year for the Social and Behavioral Sciences, as named by the UMBC Alumni Association.

Besides the hard work with his student-athletes — whose grades are outstanding, he says with pride — Chad is an outspoken advocate for giving back. As he sees it, supporting UMBC is a way of showing his pride in a place that made a major impact in his life — both as an athlete and as a student — and a way of investing in students who will benefit for years to come.

“I’m still close with my teammates, and most of them are donors, too, because I think we all had such a good experience here,” he said.

“I have every reason to give. My athletes deserve my support, my program deserves my support and the University deserves it. I don’t know what my life would be like without UMBC.”

Once upon a time, Omolola Eniola-Adefeso ’99, chemical engineering, was on track to attend medical school. But she became a chemical engineer instead – so she could better attack problems such as her number one target: heart disease.

Eniola-Adefeso, an assistant professor of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan, investigates radical ways of delivering medicine that could prove efficient and effective than current practice. And she may succeed because she is thinks like an engineer – and not a doctor. Eniola-Adefeso came to Maryland from her native Nigeria the age of 16. She began her studies at Catonsville Community College, before transferring to UMBC, where she met the late Janice Lumpkin, an African-American chemical engineering professor. Lumpkin not only guided her student into a field where her passion for technology and medicine could intersect, but also helped her become a member of the first class of UMBC students in the Minority Access to Research Careers program.

After graduating from UMBC, she took a doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania in 2004. Her scholarship for graduate studies there was actually named after Lumpkin – who also attended Penn and died tragically after childbirth in 1997.

In 2006, Eniola-Adefeso (pronounced ah-DAY-feso and known to everyone as “Lola”) joined the faculty at Michigan where her lab seeks ways to create and use miniscule synthetic pellets to mimic white blood cells and deliver medicine more efficiently.

Read the full story in the Fall 2011 issue of UMBC Magazine.

Read more about UMBC alumni at Retriever Net, UMBC’s alumni online community.

Some students studying abroad fall in love with a place. Maggie Lebherz ’08, modern languages and linguistics, fell in love with some new tastes during her semester at the University of Salamanca.

“Tasting fresh olive oil added an entirely new dimension to it, and I also learned about the health benefits of olive oil,” she says. “I had never had true balsamic vinegar, and even the best ones on the market here could not compare to what I had in Spain.”

The love affair that Lebherz developed with balsamic vinegar and fresh olive oil while studying in Spain has translated into a most unusual business venture: Lebherz Oil & Vinegar Emporium (LOVE) in her hometown of Frederick.

After graduating from UMBC, Lebherz returned to Frederick, working as a translator for the local school system. However, when a redistricting left her with a job as a secretary, she began to consider opening her own store focused on the two products she loved: olive oil and vinegar. Many people thought she was nuts to build a business on two products. But, as Lebherz says, “I told people that Baskin-Robbins ‘just’ sells ice cream.”

Read the full story in the Fall 2011 issue of UMBC Magazine.

Read more about UMBC alumni on Retriever Net, UMBC’s alumni online community.

As an analytical chemist and senior scientist for consumer goods giant Proctor & Gamble, Ronita Marple ’05 Ph.D., chemistry, observes that it’s not unusual for her to walk past a lab and catch a glimpse of a robot testing a product by performing a household chore over and over again, for hours on end, to identify a product’s weaknesses without stressing out human testers in the process.

Such grueling tests are part of how all of the nearly 125 products marketed by Proctor & Gamble end up in a consumer’s shopping cart. So is Marple’s own job mundane and robotic? “Never,” laughs the recipient of UMBC Alumna of the Year Award in the Sciences, who manages a team of chemists that unravel the technology behind each line of personal care at the corporation’s Cincinnati headquarters.

“Maybe there’s a new ingredient [in a product]: It’s my job to come up with a method to measure it,” she explains. Shampoo, for example. “There are just tons of ingredients in every bottle,” she says. Her team can scan a dollop of shampoo using a technique known as “whole product NMR” to determine the identity and concentration of each ingredient in the formula.

Marple and her team must also help ensure that most important ingredients of all – those responsible for cleaning and conditioning hair – remain stable and optimally concentrated between factory and shower. After all, that dollop of shampoo must trek cross country in a sweltering delivery truck before it becomes lather on a lustrous head of hair.

You don’t want to feel like you’re washing your hair with dish soap,” says Marple. “On the other hand, you want enough conditioning that it feels good.”

Read the full story in the Fall 2011 issue of UMBC Magazine.

Read more alumni stories at Retriever Net, UMBC’s alumni online community.