• Thirteen teams of students submitted detailed proposals for improving the campus as a part of SGA’s Prove It! competition.  Later this semester, undergraduates will vote to select the winning proposal from among a small number of finalists.  I’m told that the quality of the proposals is high, with no clear frontrunner.  The winning proposal receives an implementation grant of up to $30,000, and the winning team gets to keep a $5,000 cash prize. 
  

• Four members of the UMBC staff with whom I’ve worked are leaving for positions elsewhere.  I’m sad to see them go; each has gone above and beyond their job responsibilities to support students and strengthen the UMBC community.  Michael Varhol, a University Counseling Services counselor, is leaving to pursue his interest in providing long-term psychoanalytic care in private practice.  Lisa Benjamin, Program Coordinator in the Office of Undergraduate Education, will become Director of New Student Programs at Towson University.  Police Chief Antonio Williams has accepted the position of Chief of Police at the University of Maryland, Baltimore.  And Adrienne Mercer, Director of Human Relations, is leaving to pursue new professional and educational goals.
  

• Governor O’Malley submitted a budget plan that includes a 3% tuition hike at University System of Maryland campuses, including UMBC, for for in-state undergraduate students in 2010-2011.  Out of state and graduate student tuition would rise by 5% under the plan.  The increase would be the first in five years.  The state is facing a $2 billion gap between projected revenues and expenses.  Staff members face a second year without cost-of-living increases and merit raises.

• Despite the furloughs, the ongoing hiring freeze and the generally grim economic forecast, members of the UMBC community exceeded the campus goal of 1,000 contributions to the annual Maryland Charity Campaign.  The campaign generated 1,085 UMBC employee contributions, up from 930 in 2009 and 703 in 2008.
  

• In the face of a massive dip in advertising revenues, The Retriever Weekly sought and received financial assistance from SGA.  Even with the $26,500 in emergency SGA funding for the spring semester, TRW faces some difficult choices as it strives to streamline its operations, adapt to the changing ad market and continue providing useful and timely information to the UMBC community.
  

• 50 students and 5 staff members spent five days and four nights together at STRiVE, UMBC’s intensive off-campus leadership retreat.  We’re still compiling the evaluations, but there is absolutely no doubt that it was an incredible experience for participants and coaches alike (I was one of the coaches).  Consider applying to participate next year!  I’ll be posting about other leadership development opportunities in the next few months, including a chance to participate in a regional student leadership retreat during the summer.
  

• The hot dog and Dippin’ Dots vending machines in The Commons’ Game Room were replaced by a new vending machine with a variety of microwaveable sandwiches and snacks.  (Will anyone miss those hot dogs?). 

• UMBC Magazine published its Winter 2010 issue, featuring the usual interesting and well-written alumni profiles, insights from faculty research, Q andA with Dr. Hrabowski and much more.
  

• The Student Involvement Center in the Office of Student Life launched a new web site with resources for student organizations and students wanting to get more involved on campus.

Brooke Coley ’03, chemical engineering, remembers it as a dream play for a football defense. Two defenders burst through the offensive line just moments after the snap, trapping the quarterback in the backfield. One defender tackles the quarterback, allowing the second defender to zero in on the ball and yank it loose.

As the football falls from the quarterback’s hands to the turf, the second defender alertly scoops up the ball and scampers all the way down the field for a 41-yard touchdown. Coley was the second defender on the play, and the touchdown she scored were the first points ever tallied by the Pittsburgh Force: a women’s football team that began playing last year.

She still smiles broadly when she talks about the play. “I go in the history books for our team. For the first TD to be a defensive TD; I wasn’t expecting that at all,” says Coley. “It was cool. It was a really good feeling.”

Coley is a Tidewater, VA native who played four sports in high school. But as a member of the tenth class of Meyerhoff Scholars at UMBC (M10), Coley decided to limit her pursuit of athletic glory as she pursued a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering.

After graduation, Coley began working toward a Ph.D. in bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh. She expects to receive her degree this spring.

But Coley heard the call of athletics – and the gridiron, in particular – as she sprinted for a doctorate. It began one night while she was playing pickup basketball one night, when she received an offer to try out for the Pittsburgh Passion, a team that was playing in a women’s football league. While Coley had played some rugby while she was at UMBC, she had never really considered playing football.

Coley made the team and quickly fell in love with the game. She joined the Pittsburgh Passion as a safety and linebacker in 2006. Coley played with the Passion for three seasons until moving to a new expansion team in the women’s league – the Pittsburgh Force – this past spring.

“I’m an aggressive person, but I’m always thinking, always calculating,” says Coley. “One thing that was hard for me for football was that our coaches tend to want us to be animated, and they want us to growl. They’ll say, ‘You girls aren’t mad enough, aren’t angry.’ If a player comes my way, I’m going to get her, but I don’t have to growl at her or anything like that.”

Coley prefers to let her play do all the talking. Another one of her favorite plays came when she had to cover a wide receiver who was talking trash at the line of scrimmage. Coley gave no verbal response, but instead flattened her talkative opponent when she tried to catch a pass only moments later. As the player lay stunned on the ground, Coley quietly reached down and helped her up.

“She didn’t say another thing the whole game,” recalls Coley with a smile.

Coley isn’t sure what the future holds for her professionally, but she professes that she’d love to return to UMBC – which she says is “like a second home to me” – as a teacher and researcher with Dr. Timmie Topoleski, who was a mentor during her undergraduate years.

Coley picked UMBC and the Meyerhoff program over Duke after receiving acceptance letters to the schools only one day apart. Coley said her trip to UMBC during the Meyerhoff selection process quickly sold her on the school, even though she had spent lots of time talking with her family about her love for Duke.

Though Coley is now busy crunching data and finishing her doctoral thesis, she says she will continue playing football this spring. She views the three-hour practices that the Force holds three times a week during the season as great outlets for relieving academic stress and staying in shape.

“Football used to be a game I watched on TV,” Coley said. “I watch the game differently now. Now I know what it means to be a player.”

— Jeff Seidel ’85

If you marvel at how well UMBC’s buildings have been maintained over the last decade or so, you can point to the hard work of James Donlan ’85, economics, who until recently served as the university’s director of facilities management.

In that position, Donlan supervised the maintenance of 3.6 million square feet in UMBC’s 49 buildings. He also guided the university through some of its most challenging renovations of major buildings and constructions of new buildings in the past 15 years.

And while his departure means the university has big work boots to fill, Donlan is tackling a challenge that will call on his organizational skills, and the experience he has gleaned from his years at UMBC and his experiences as a colonel in the United States Marine Corps Reserves: leading a project designed to combat the deadly improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that are a favored weapon of insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Donlan says that he is sad to leave UMBC. “But the opportunity presented itself to work on a project with a significant impact on saving lives,” he says. “That made the decision easier.”

It was Donlan’s work on a recent tour of duty as a Marine combat engineering officer in the Marine Corps’ War Fighting Lab in Quantico, VA, that led him to his new position. The lab, he says, “finds scientific and technological solutions to problems the Marines are having in combat.” The goals of such work, he observes, is to find ways to “harden vehicles and protect people.”

Donlan’s work in that group led him to participation in a joint working group on the deadly explosives culled from all branches of the armed forces by the Department of Defense. “It is sort of a Manhattan Project to predict and prevent IEDs,” says Donlan of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, or JIEDDO.

After Donlan’s tour was up, he was contacted by CenTauri Solutions – a defense contractor which had won an $11.7 million bid with the Pentagon and JIEDDO to work on new techniques to detect IEDs with aerial electromagnetic sensors. The group recruited Donlan as a project director on the new effort, dubbed “Yellow Jacket.” He began work on the project in the autumn.

On his tour of active duty in Iraq in 2004 and 2005 (including a stint in Fallujah), Donlan says that he “encountered multiple IEDs on a daily basis, either disarming them or finding them.” Helping his fellow solders identify and neutralize the threat, he adds, proved a strong lure to sign up for Yellow Jacket.

Donlan’s tasks at UMBC may not have taken on the life or death quality of his work as a Marine, but his steady efforts as the university erected new structures and renovated key buildings were a crucial element in UMBC’s growth. Donlan succeeded the late Richard Butler in 1994, first as associate director and later as director of facilities management.

In Donlan’s tenure, UMBC constructed the Information Technology and Engineering (ITE) building, the Public Policy building, the Physics building and a number of new residential buildings. “In the 1990s, there was construction fence everywhere,” Donlan recalls. “As I look back at it now, it seems like we were building everywhere.”

Yet Donlan feels that UMBC has retained a lot of what made it special for him as a student in the 1980s. “The campus has doubled in size,” he observes. “But it still feels small. It’s big enough that it has all of the amenities of a larger school, but it’s still small enough that it feels like a family.” (Indeed, his son Justin Donlan ’11 is a student in UMBC’s Honors College.)

Out of all his accomplishments at UMBC, Donlan points to the renovations of the biology and chemistry buildings as the most satisfying. “The biology and chemistry buildings were two of the toughest jobs we did,” he says. “We did both of them in occupied settings.”

The chemistry renovation posed vexing problems for Donlan and his team to solve.

“We were building a building on top of a building,” Donlan recalls. “The building was built like a tank. The air handling systems and everything else were in the basement. At [the time of the building’s construction], that was great idea. It worked well. But when you’ve got to replace those systems, there’s no way to get back in there. So we actually had to take the mechanical rooms that were in the basement and put them on the roof.”

Sensitivity to the important research that was happening in both buildings was also a key element in both successful renovations, Donlan says, because any mistakes “could have a devastating impact on researchers’ careers.”

— Richard Byrne ’86