Hailey Turney, M.A. ’21, first came to UMBC as a student pursuing an academic passion in the text, technologies, and literature program. She connected right away with faculty and other community members. Now, as an undergraduate academic advisor in the College of Engineering and Information Technology and an instructor teaching introductory English and university orientation classes, she helps current UMBC connect and find their own path, too. 

Hailey shares what she loves about UMBC and her advising job. Take it away, Hailey!

Q: Tell us about yourself. 

A: I am a COEIT academic advisor. I mostly work with mechanical engineering students now. I also teach a section of ENGL 100 each semester and UNIV 101 in the fall semesters. I love being able to help students and engage in my community, so advising and teaching feels like a great way to reach students on different levels. 

When I was an undergrad, I did not have the best advising experience, so being able to make a difference as an advisor now feels like an interesting, but great, twist of fate. I also like to play Volo soccer in Baltimore and do Dog’s Day Out at BARCS outside of work!

Q: Who are some of the people at UMBC who have most supported you?

A: My amazing boss Emily Abrams-Stephens is spectacular. She supports me and my fellow advisors every day. She is always advocating for us and showing us how much she cares everyday. Working with her, I never doubt that I am valued here. She always listens to our ideas and is a fantastic (and popular) morning chat partner.

I had a previous job that weighed on me every minute of the day—even outside of work. I missed the activities I loved to do because of it. At UMBC, I have a trusting team—my boss and my fellow advisors—that supports me. If I am ever away, I know my students will be taken care of by my colleagues. The trust I have in my team is something I will never be able to replace. The most remarkable thing about UMBC is the people.

Q: What’s the one thing you’d want someone who hasn’t joined the UMBC community to know about the support you find here?

A: There will always be someone in your corner. I did my master’s here and it was the first time I immediately felt seen in my academic career. When I came to work here, I immediately felt wanted and supported. There are so many resources available to the UMBC community and there is always someone there to help you find them. As an advisor, it is now my job and honor to help students find those resources and their own supporting community.

Q: What part of your job do you enjoy the most and why?

A: I love interacting with students and helping them find their way. Being that person that they can turn to when they don’t know where to go is the most important part of our job. We want students to succeed and feel secure in their place here at UMBC.

Q: What brought you to UMBC in the first place? 

A: I came to UMBC because I wanted to expand my knowledge on a topic I was passionate about. The faculty in the English department had so many interesting areas of study that I knew I would be well-supported in finding my own. After meeting with some faculty members for a graduate assistantship, I felt hopeful that this would be an interactive community. The faculty responded to my emails right away, were interested in what I had to say, and were encouraging from the beginning. I came for the academics and stayed for the community. This continued as I found a job here at UMBC as well—I was hesitant to leave. 

Q: What would you tell someone who is considering a career at UMBC?

A: You will find a great community here. You will also find ways to continue to improve and learn no matter where you end up.

* * * * *

UMBC’s greatest strength is its people. When people meet Retrievers and hear about the passion they bring, the relationships they create, the ways they support each other, and the commitment they have to inclusive excellence, they truly get a sense of our community. That’s what “Meet a Retriever” is all about.

Learn more about how UMBC can help you achieve your goals.

UMBC has established a new M.S. graduate program in Artificial Intelligence in the CSEE Department. Designed for students seeking to go beyond a general computing degree, the program offers a focused, rigorous pathway into AI research, development, and deployment, equipping graduates to drive innovation across industry, government, and academia. Read more about the new AI MA program here.

This program is now enrolling for the fall 2026 semester! Apply by August 1 here.

As many of you already know, today marks the last day of UMBC employment for CAHSS's longtime research development anchor and lifelong arts & humanities advocate, Associate Director of CARAT Rachel Brubaker. 

Over the course of Rachel's nearly 30 years at UMBC, she has helped faculty (and the college) to shape, hone, and find funding for their research in ways that were both fundamental to their career and equally fundamental to the stature and standing of CAHSS as a whole.

Put simply, Rachel knows the funding landscape and how to navigate it better than anyone I've ever worked with. 

Her work was often quiet: collating and curating targeted funding opportunities for faculty, consulting with PIs to strategize and nudge their project ideas along (or slow them down if they needed more thought!), helping projects to create programming, content, and educational goals, scaffolding funding across a research arc rather than just in a single project, and navigating the many internal processes and protocols so that faculty didn't need to do so themselves. 

I honestly could spend another 1000 words recounting her work here, but I think that a much simpler summation captures her career far better than the specifics do:

Rachel believed that the work of CAHSS faculty was of R1 stature long before the university itself received that designation. 

She believed that the depth and breadth of the work that is done by faculty here was essential not only to the university, but to the larger fields and communities they serve.

And, most vitally, she believed in the critical need to foster and elevate the arts and humanities in everything we do here at UMBC (and in this country), arguing throughout her career that we should proudy place the research and projects done in these fields on equal footing to anything else this university produces. 

We will do everything we can to keep Rachel's work alive here in CARAT but, truthfully, she's one-of-one, and we can only hope to dutifully follow her the path she blazed during her tenure. 

The good news is that these paths have now been paved by her many successes and are simply the ways things are done now in CAHSS. It is and will be impossible to conduct sponsored research here in the college without touching upon some approach or process or strategy that Rachel helped to pioneer. 

On behalf of everyone here in CARAT, we congratulate Rachel on her incredible career and wish her all the best in every single moment of her well-earned retirement. She will be missed!

Thanks for everything, Rachel! Off you go!

Marc & The CARAT Team

===

Rachel can still be reached at her current email address:

rbruba1@umbc.edu

If you've been working with Rachel on a project, or have a question you would normally send her way, please feel free to reach out to me directly at mruppel@umbc.edu. 

Over the past semester David and Ciara hosted a number of UMBC Talks forums at which participants have had the opportunity to share their stories, pool their wisdom, and offer feedback on the Division of Institutional Equity’s draft framework for inclusive excellence at UMBC.

They hope that anyone who did not have a chance to participate in the UMBC Talks forums will take some time to review the draft framework and offer feedback by completing this form by next Friday, June 5?

We appreciate anyone taking the time to lend their voice to this effort.  Each voice is valued and appeciated.   

Dr. Özgür Çapraz, Associate Professor, CBEE, was invited to showcase his contributions to the field of electrochemistry in a new publication in the Journal of Electrochemical Energy Conversion and Storage titled "Emerging Investigators in Electrochemical Energy Conversion and Storage 2025."

The article is available here:
Emerging Investigators in Electrochemical Energy Conversion and Storage 2025 - ASME

https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4071726

Editorial:

This special issue features the 2025 Emerging Investigators in Electrochemical Energy Conversion and Storage. Twenty-three emerging investigators were invited to this special issue to showcase up-and-coming scientists and engineers in the field of electrochemical energy conversion and storage. Emerging investigators are typically in the early stages of their independent careers (within about 12 years following graduation with a doctorate degree) and have demonstrated potential for high impact in the field. The purpose of this special issue is to highlight emerging scientists and engineers making outstanding contributions to the field of electrochemical energy conversion and storage. 

901 Saint Charles Ave, Baltimore, MD 21229

1 furnished room for rent, about 1.6 miles from UMBC (around 4 minutes by car).

Parking available
UMBC campus shuttle stop right outside the door
Furnished room
Kitchen access
Move-in ready
WiFi and utilities shared

If interested, please text 667-786-9042 to schedule a viewing. Thank you!

The REX 2.0 Analytics Portal is currently unavailable. We are working to resolve the issues with accessing Tableau and will update you when it is available again.  We apologize for the inconvenience.

Dhruva Kathuria (618/UMBC) is a Co-Investigator on the recently funded NASA ROSES-Ecohydrology proposal “Enhancing flash drought prediction by quantifying vegetation responses to rainfall and heatwave pulses.” This three-year grant is led by Dr. Yanlan Liu (UCLA), with Drs. Kai Zhu (Univ. of Michigan), Alexey Shiklomanov (GSFC), and Kathuria, as the Co-Is.

The United States has been experiencing frequent flash droughts in recent decades, resulting in severe ecological and socioeconomic impacts. While normal droughts occur over two to three months with below-normal rainfall, flash droughts intensify over weeks, with a combination of little rain, high temperatures, and strong winds, resulting in water loss from evapotranspiration (ET). Current land surface models struggle to accurately predict flash droughts due to unclear ecohydrological mechanisms that drive the initiation and intensification of a flash drought. Mega-droughts typically are driven by climate oscillations, while flash droughts are substantially influenced by subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) land-atmosphere interactions mediated by vegetation. Following rainfall and heatwave pulses, soil and atmosphere dry-downs can trigger a cascade of ecohydrological feedback within the soil-plant-atmosphere system (SPAS). Under certain vegetation and atmospheric conditions, a positive feedback loop could emerge.

Dr. Kathuria explains, “The positive feedback can arise in some cases when a rainfall event is followed by a heatwave pulse. After rainfall pulses, large ET contributes to soil dry-downs, which can be further accelerated by the heatwave. When the soil dries out and the air heats up, plants can sometimes (though not always) respond by "shutting down" and releasing less water. This then backfires: less water released into the air means even hotter, drier conditions, which dries the soil further, triggering a vicious cycle that can rapidly spiral into a flash drought. We hypothesize that this happens more frequently in areas with higher biomass and in arid climates. To improve flash drought prediction, it is critical to mechanistically quantify the ecohydrological dynamics within the SPAS, which are co-regulated by vegetation and the physical environment, and to clarify their roles in driving flash droughts; hence, this forms the overarching goal of the project. This research will be among the first to mechanistically quantify how vegetation responses after rainfall and heatwave pulses regulate flash droughts.”

“The proposal has three stages, moving from data-driven insight toward improved forecasting. First, we will use a data-driven approach to explore the causal relationships between vegetation dynamics, climate conditions, and flash drought indicators across a wide variety of biomes. We plan to do this using causal machine learning methods applied to a broad mix of field and remote sensing data. Second, we will feed this understanding into a computationally efficient physical model, the Soil-Plant-Atmosphere System (SPAS), to test which physical mechanisms (soil drying, water movement within plants, and so on) contribute the most to accurately predicting flash droughts. We start with SPAS because it is computationally light and easy to run experiments on. Finally, we will use what we learn from SPAS to develop better parameterizations for the land surface model (Noah-MP) within NASA's Land Information System (LIS), improving its ability to forecast flash droughts. Noah-MP is computationally expensive, so the logic of the workflow is sequential: data-driven causal ML informs the efficient SPAS model, and SPAS in turn informs Noah-MP in LIS. Ultimately, the project will produce a large-scale model-data toolkit to improve flash drought prediction across the western U.S. The outcome will contribute to enhanced S2S hydroclimate forecasts and support mitigation strategies for future flash drought events.”

Overview:

This CITI webinar is designed for new and early-career principal investigators and faculty who are managing sponsored research. Participants will gain a clear understanding of the financial responsibilities associated with managing federal and other sponsored awards, including understanding your award, monitoring budgets, and ensuring costs are reasonable, allocable, and allowable. 

The webinar provides practical strategies for monthly financial oversight and highlights common pitfalls that can trigger audit findings. The webinar includes usable tips and techniques to help manage grants effectively, avoid compliance issues, and support the long-term success of research programs.

Presentation by:

Tiffany Cunningham, JD - The Pennsylvania State University

Registration Link:

https://about.citiprogram.org/event/free-live-webinar-understanding-and-monitoring-research-awards-a-guide-for-faculty/

Even though AOK Library is not offering live workshops this summer, you can still build your research, writing, and information skills by watching recordings from our spring workshops.

Recordings cover topics designed to support students at different stages of the research process, from getting organized to using research tools more effectively.

View the workshop recordings here: https://www.youtube.com/@umbclibrary/videos 

Need one-on-one research help this summer? Make a research appointment with a subject librarian.