Researching a Cure for Alzheimer’s

 

In UMBC’s recently renovated Chemistry Building, Jesse Karr, a chemistry and biochemistry Ph.D. student, is standing over a brand-new electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectrometer, one of the more recent research acquisitions at UMBC and the ‘pride and joy’ of his mentor, Assistant Professor Veronika A. Szalai.

Karr is researching copper-metal ions and the influence they have on the neurodegenerative factor of Alzheimer’s disease. Copper plays a more important role in our bodies than most people realize, he said.

“Copper is actually biologically relevant; we all have a lot more copper in our bodies then most people know,” he says. “It has been implicated in A-beta fibril formation, the possible neurotoxic species and hallmark characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease. If you can figure out how copper is binding to these fibrils in an AD patient, you can hopefully figure out a way to take the copper out. In other words, if you can prevent copper from binding, you can potentially stop Alzheimer’s disease.”

Karr said he feels drawn to the study of chemistry, a bond that only grows stronger as his research at UMBC progresses. “People ask me, ‘Why are you involved in chemistry?’ And I realize that I’ve met really motivating, inspirational people in chemistry … it started in high school chemistry all the way up to my current advisor, Dr. Szalai. I think she’s a great mentor.”

Originally from New York, Karr received a B.S. in Chemistry from Plattsburgh State, one of the SUNY schools in the New York State University System. While he was hesitant to move, the outstanding faculty and the research opportunities at UMBC won him over.

“I did online searches for graduate schools and UMBC just kept coming up, so I started asking questions about it … I just kept looking into it and decided it was the best fit for me,” he says. “The equipment seemed a lot more advanced, the faculty was nice, I just got an overall better impression from UMBC.”

(7/25/05)

 

 

Inside the New York Times

Last semester, UMBC Retriever Weekly editors were invited to go “Inside the New York Times” to learn about day-to-day operations and to develop their journalistic skills. Joe Howley and Doug Miller, who recently became Retriever editor-in-chief and news editor, respectively, attended the Times’ annual symposium along with editors from over two dozen student newspapers across the country.

Students met with Times’ managing editors and correspondents to discuss how they cover the news and make decisions about editorial content, participated in a workshop on the editing process and exchanged ideas with other student editors.

“To be invited to attend the symposium was an honor,” said Howley. “And to be able to get insight into how such a major organization operates was invaluable.”

Miller added that he and Howley will apply some of that insight to the Retriever. “Visiting the Times was an informative and inspirational opportunity that will help us in our goal to continue improving our product and address the needs of the campus with increasing accuracy and efficiency,” said Miller.

“Joe and Doug have both worked very hard to improve the Retriever,” said Christopher Corbett, Retriever Weekly faculty advisor and English faculty member. “Going to the New York Times conference gave them exposure to serious journalism. They also got to meet and hear from their contemporaries at college and university newspapers—large and small—all over the U.S. We hope to do this again next year.”

Both Howley and Miller credit Corbett for helping Retriever editors and writers get real-world exposure at events like “Inside the Times” and at local and regional papers.

“Christopher Corbett is an invaluable asset to our paper because of his many years of experience working for the Associated Press and other large news organizations,” said Miller. “Thanks in large part to his guidance, members of our staff have been offered exciting internships at the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun and Patuxent Publishing, among other news organizations. A good percentage of the Retriever’s staff gain employment with local papers immediately after graduation.”

(7/5/05)

 

 

UMBC Astrophysicist Leads International Team of Scientists, Satellites

Contact: Chip Rose
UMBC News
410-455-5793
crose@umbc.edu
View/download High Resolution Images & Animation Online

An international team of scientists led by a UMBC astrophysicist has uncovered a rare type of neutron star so elusive that it took three satellites to identify it. The discovery highlights the complementary nature of European and U.S. satellites to reveal new insights about star birth and death in our galaxy.

The neutron star, an ultradense ember of an exploded star, was first seen by the European Space Agency's INTEGRAL satellite. The neutron star is in a "double hiding place," the scientists said: deep in a spiral arm of our Milky Way galaxy, obscured by dust; and buried in a two-star system enshrouded by dense gas.

The scientists couldn't immediately decipher the nature of the object, so they enlisted NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer and the newly launched Swift satellite to observe it in different wavelengths.

"Our Galaxy's spiral arms are loaded with neutron stars, black holes and other exotic objects," said Volker Beckmann of NASA and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s Joint Center for Astrophysics, lead author on a paper appearing in the Astrophysical Journal. "The problem is, the spiral arms are too dusty to see through. The right combination of X-ray and gamma-ray telescopes can reveal what's hiding there. And this provides new clues about the true star formation rate in our Galaxy."

Neutron stars are the core remains of supernovas, exploded stars once about ten times as massive as the Sun. Neutron stars contain about a sun's worth of mass compacted into a sphere about 15 miles across. The subject of today's announcement is a neutron star called IGR J16283-4838 in the direction of the spiral arm Norma, about 20,000 light years away.

IGR J16283-4838 is the seventh so-called "highly absorbed," or hidden, neutron star identified. Neutron stars, born of fast-burning massive stars, are intrinsically tied to star formation rates. They are also energetic beacons from a region too dusty to study in detail otherwise. As more and more are discovered, new insights about what is happening in the Galaxy's spiral arms begin to emerge, Beckmann said.

IGR J16283-4838 revealed itself during an outburst on or near its surface. Neutron stars such as IGR J16283-4838 are often part of binary systems, orbiting a normal star. Occasionally, gas from the normal star, lured by gravity, crashes onto the surface of the neutron star and releases a great amount of energy. Outbursts can last for weeks before the system returns to dormancy for months or years.

INTEGRAL, the Rossi Explorer and Swift each detect X rays and gamma rays, which are far more energetic than the visible light our eyes can detect. Yet each satellite has different capabilities. INTEGRAL has a large field of view, enabling it to scan the Milky Way galaxy for neutron star and black hole activity.

Swift contains a high-resolution X-ray telescope, which allowed scientists to zero in on IGR J16283-4838. The Rossi Explorer has a timing spectrometer, a device used to uncover properties of the light source, such as speed and rapid variations on the order of a millisecond. The Galaxy's spiral arms block visible light from reaching us, but not energetic X rays and gamma rays.

Simona Soldi, a doctoral candidate at INTEGRAL Science Data Centre in Geneva discovered the new, bright source with INTEGRAL on April 7, 2005. "We are always hunting for new sources," she said. "It's exciting when we find something so elusive. How many more like this are out there?"

Because gamma rays are hard to focus into sharp images, the science team used the X-ray Telescope on Swift on April 13 and 15 to determine a precise location. Swift confirmed that the light was "highly absorbed," which means the binary system was filled with dense gas from the stellar wind of the companion star. Starting on April 14, the scientists used the Rossi Explorer to observe the source as it faded away. This observation revealed a familiar light signature clinching the case for a fading "high-mass X-ray binary" with a neutron star.

"Piece by piece we solved this puzzle," said Dr. Jamie Kennea of the Swift science team at Penn State. "Swift was built primarily to detect gamma-ray bursts, so it was thrill to use the X-ray Telescope to do something quite different, to discover a neutron star."

INTEGRAL, the International Gamma Ray Astrophysics Laboratory, was launched in 2002. The Rossi Explorer and Swift launched in 1995 and 2004, respectively.

Thanks to NASA Goddard News for sharing this story.

Ph.D. Students Analyze Baltimore’s Inner Suburbs

“In scholarly literature, there is a lot of interest about inner suburbs, those older suburban communities near the central city. We found that these areas suffer from increasing poverty and declining incomes. Therefore, we set off to better understand these urban dynamics,” said Bernadette Hanlon, a public policy Ph.D. candidate at UMBC and one of two authors of “The State of the Inner Suburbs,” an analysis of the urban decline surrounding Baltimore.

“There is room for public policy to intervene, to stop this decline, to process and revitalize the suburban communities,” said co-author Thomas J. Vicino, public policy Ph.D. candidate. “We’re at a crossroads, where the suburbs haven’t declined as far as old Baltimore, and there is hope.”

Both Hanlon and Vicino are researchers at UMBC’s Center for Urban and Environmental Research and Education (CUERE). After a year of compiling massive amounts of data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Vicino and Hanlon developed a new system for classifying the suburbs that ring Baltimore’s beltway.

“Because the inner suburbs are juxtaposed by outer suburbs, there’s a lot of talk in Maryland of ‘smart growth,’ and where to direct new development,” said Vicino.

“The State of the Inner Suburbs” is currently under consideration for publication in the Journal of Urban Affairs. The data was presented at the national Urban Affairs Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, and to a group of state legislators, politicians and other academics. It was also a front page story in the Baltimore Sun.

The report is potentially useful to legislators, from the migration of work and the composition of the work force to the deflation of property values. “I’d like to see the community and policy makers look to our research as a way to target investment in the communities,” said Vicino, while Hanlon added, “We’ve done analysis on Baltimore, and we hope to continue our research in a comparative context in other urban areas throughout the country.”

“The State of the Inner Suburbs” is available for download at: www.umbc.edu/cuere/inner_ring.

(6/20/05)

 

A Global Action Plan for Women in IT

 

For the first time, technology leaders from 22 countries and six continents will gather to explore concrete ways in which access by girls and women to technology can be increased in order to effect economic, social and political change. The First International Symposium on Women and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) will convene June 12-14 in downtown Baltimore. Participants from developing and developed countries will include leaders from business, government and non-government agencies and educational institutions.

The symposium was organized and is co-hosted by UMBC’s Center for Women and Information Technology (CWIT), the World Trade Center Institute, the World Bank and Women in Global Science and Technology; it is held in cooperation with the ACM (Association of Computer Machinery)

Through the exchange of ideas and experiences, the symposium’s organizers expect to create an action agenda to significantly increase the international participation of girls and women in ICT–including leadership of women in technology business–in the next five years.

“This is an important time for women and technology,” said Claudia Morrell, CWIT’s executive director. “ICTs for girls and women will either become a new tool for increased access to education, economics, and social equity or it will create a new form of discrimination. In either case, the ramifications for all of us are vast. The symposium will address topics that we know need exploring, and we have sought out the world’s leading authorities to discuss current hurdles and possible solutions.”

Among the speakers will be authorities on ICT and the global economy, including widely published authors Jo Sanders, Sue Rosser and Sophia Huyer, as well as corporate leaders from North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia. Maryland’s lieutenant governor, Michael Steele, will address participants at an opening reception. The U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Commission for Women, Ellen Sauerbrey, honorary chair, and UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski will be keynote speakers.

More information about the symposium is available online.

(6/6/05)

 

Edwards and Kelcey Moves Baltimore Office

bwtech@UMBC, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County's on-campus research and technology park, announced today that two new corporate tenants have agreed to relocate to the park’s second building, 5523 Research Park Drive, recently completed by international property developer Grosvenor.

The new tenants are the healthcare communications and technology firm Physicians Practice, Inc., formerly of Glen Burnie, and the engineering/design firm Edwards and Kelcey, which moves its Baltimore office to UMBC from Caton Avenue.

Physicians Practice is publisher of Physicians Practice: The Business Journal for Physicians, the most widely circulated practice management journal for physicians in the country. The firm is also known for its award-winning Web site, www.PhysiciansPractice.com, and a weekly e-mail newsletter, Physicians Practice Pearls.

Physicians Practice comes to UMBC thanks in part to the close ties to the University by president, co-founder and UMBC alumnus Scott Weber, who graduated in 1985 with a degree in interdisciplinary studies. Weber, a former president of the UMBC Alumni Association, continues to advise students in UMBC's Alex. Brown Center for Entrepreneurship on starting up and running a successful business. The company, which will occupy most of the second floor, currently employs 45 people.

"UMBC offers an excellent strategic location for us to grow our business, with its thriving technology environment, wealth of intellectual capital, and convenient proximity to transportation," said Gerry Hartung, chief executive officer and co-founder of Physicians Practice. "We look forward to partnering with UMBC as our business continues to grow throughout the region and country."

Edwards and Kelcey is a nationally recognized engineering, design, planning and construction management firm which has been in business since 1946. Headquartered in Morristown, NJ, Edwards and Kelcey has 900 employees, 23 regional offices and is ranked 68th among the Top 500 U.S. Design Firms by Engineering News-Record (ENR). Edwards and Kelcey employs 25 transportation engineers and planners locally, and is currently providing services to the Maryland Aviation Administration, Maryland State Highway Administration, City of Baltimore, and other local DOTs.

K.R. Marshall, EK's Baltimore Office Manager said, "Our new location at UMBC will allow us to optimally service our transportation clients in the Baltimore region. With convenient access to BWI and downtown Baltimore, coupled with partnership opportunities with the UMBC engineering department, Edwards and Kelcey looks forward to continued success in the Maryland market."

"UMBC's thriving business community consists of nearly 40 companies in various industries," said Ellen Hemmerly, executive director of UMBC Research Park Corporation. "We are delighted to welcome Physicians Practice and Edwards and Kelcey to our entrepreneurial, research intensive campus."

"UMBC's research and technology park demonstrates the impact of higher education and business coming together," said David S. Iannucci, executive director for the Baltimore County Department of Economic Development. "The mix of new tenants at bwtech@UMBC represents the range of entrepreneurial organizations that will benefit from this unique facility."

bwtech@UMBC's first two buildings were developed by Grosvenor, one of the largest private real estate companies in the world with a global property portfolio of $7 billion. The park's 62,000 square-foot first building has been leased by the information technology firm RWD Technologies since 2001.

UMBC's research park and incubator have received public and private sector funding from the Maryland Economic Development Corporation, the State of Maryland, the City of Baltimore, Baltimore County, the U.S. Department of Commerce, The Abell Foundation, and the Maryland Technology Development Corporation. In 2003, bwtech@UMBC became part of Baltimore County's Southwest Enterprise Zone, making companies moving to the park eligible for credits on real property and income taxes, as well as credits for creating new jobs.

Celebrating the Class of 2005

 

This year, UMBC will award degrees to 1200 undergraduates and more than 200 graduate students in the arts and sciences, engineering and social work.

UMBC’s Class of 2005 includes students headed to prestigious graduate programs at Brown University, Cornell University, Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins University, the London School of Economics, Stanford University, University of Arizona, University of Cambridge and the University of Westminster (England).

Other students have secured jobs with a wide spectrum of corporations, nonprofits, government agencies and universities, including AmeriCorps, the Department of Defense, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University, Microsoft, MIT, the PeaceCorps, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Proctor & Gamble and T. Rowe Price. Many will teach at public schools across Maryland.

Click here to read stories from the Class of 2005.

(5/25/05)

 

Creating Interactive Memories

 

Associate Professor of Visual Arts Lisa Moren was recently recognized for her new media art—including installations, videos, books and interactive multi-media forms—with a 2005-06 Fulbright Scholar award. Moren will lecture at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) in Prague, one of the oldest film schools in Europe.

At FAMU, Moren will teach two classes based on DIMINUENTS, which is one project in her three-part series examining memory, place and narrative in former Soviet republics. One class of film students will use new technologies to make their own interactive films, while another will focus on metaphor to create a collaborative film based on their own memories and memories of families and friends.

Moren was previously an artist-in-residence in several former Soviet countries. She presents lectures and exhibits her works nationally and internationally, including an anticipated two-person exhibition at the Frants Gallery in SoHo, New York City. A multiple-year recipient of the Maryland State Arts Council award, Moren has published her work in Performance Research and a forthcoming issue of Visible Language.

In 2003, Moren curated and wrote the exhibition catalog for “Intermedia: the Dick Higgins Collection” at UMBC’s Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery. She received a National Endowment for the Arts award for her research on Higgins and the fluxus art movement. Moren also founded concretestream.umbc.edu, an international netcast of artists’ works, discussions and experimental live exchanges on the Internet. The site has featured live and curated events in collaboration with artists and organizations from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia and Slovenia.

(5/17/05)