The Office of Institutional Advancement is saddened to share the news that Sheldon Caplis, former vice president for Institutional Advancement and UMBC emeritus staff member, passed away on Tuesday, June 11, 2024. A member of the President’s Council from 1993 to 2008, Sheldon was a treasured colleague and mentor who was instrumental in moving our alumni relations, fundraising, and marketing and communications to new levels of success. 

Sheldon believed deeply in education and was passionate about philanthropy. The team he built at UMBC met challenging goals and helped establish many initiatives that are part of the campus fabric today. He guided the university in securing its first charitable gift of $1 million, and was especially proud to be a champion for the creation of the award-winning UMBC Magazine. During his tenure, he led a seven-year, $66-million fundraising campaign that exceeded its ambitious goal by $16 million.

Sheldon came to UMBC from the University of Baltimore, where he served in a variety of positions, eventually becoming the vice president for development from 1972 to 1973. He retired from UMBC in 2008 and went on to be the director of community relations at One Main Financial from 2008 to 2016 and the founder of Caplis Consulting. He was also the chair of the The Associated: Jewish Federation of Baltimore’s Life and Legacy program.

Sheldon and his wife Jamie continued to support UMBC after his retirement as loyal scholarship donors. Established in June 2003 in memory of their fathers, the Joseph Caplis and Joseph Waldman Scholarship Fund supports students in the Meyerhoff Scholars Program.

Sheldon carried his advocacy for education beyond UMBC, serving on a variety of nonprofit and educational boards, including the Community College of Baltimore County. He was born and raised in Baltimore and received his bachelor’s degree in marketing from the University of Baltimore and his M.B.A. from Morgan State University. 

Sheldon is survived by his wife Jamie, his son Jon, his daughter Allison, and four grandchildren. Services will be held at Sol Levinson's Chapel, 8900 Reisterstown Road, Pikesville, MD 21208, on Friday, June 14, 2024, at 12:00 p.m. Please omit flowers. The family will receive visitors at 113 River Oaks Circle, Pikesville, MD 21208, Friday immediately following interment and also on Sunday.

Sincerely,

Our PeopleSoft Campus Solutions environment was migrated to Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the cloud over the weekend of June 7th. This migration also involved moving the Peoplesoft Gateway services that handle all of the communication between all three PeopleSoft systems, and with all of the 3rd party groups and outside entities these systems talk to. This project has spanned multiple years from its inception to this successful implementation and took an immense effort from many groups on campus. 

Key Benefits: Having the Student Administration system alongside the Finance and HR systems in the cloud will allow us to be more responsive in adjusting service levels for surges at key times of the year like advanced registration, as well as ensuring a very high level of reliability and resiliency that we have achieved with the previous migrations. 

Participants: The Middleware and Application Infrastructure group led this effort, along with those in Enterprise Systems, Networking, System Administration, Business Systems, Project Management, Business Intelligence, and all of the functional units across campus that helped with coordination and testing to help ensure as smooth a migration as possible. Coordinating this effort between new student orientations, final grade submissions, commencements, advanced registration, the new FAFSA, and more was a monumental effort that required functional users in many areas to complete testing over the weekend, for which we are thankful for their help and support.

Remarkably, the system was back up and functional in under 24 hours from the start of the migration on Friday evening. This is a tremendous and almost unheard-of success for such a major set of changes, typically requiring a large amount of outside consulting assistance.  

Please join us in thanking everyone who has spent a good portion of not only the past few months, but the past year and more on this initiative. 

Should you experience any issues with PeopleSoft following this move, please click here to submit a ticket to the team.

What's left as of today, June 12:

-- one office desk chair with wheels

-- new gray lanyards with attachment to badge holders 

-- new packages of gray lanyards with badge holders(2)

-- full box of No 10 Regular white envelopes

-- four rolls of 2" black adhesive fastener (strenco brand)

-- two Dell monitors ONE LEFT

--  one desktop ScanSnap scanner GONE

-- one black cloth shelf bin

-- one pack multi colored construction paper  GONE

-- one box of new index tabs for binders

-- random envelopes and cables

-- one trifold presentation board

The Language, Literacy, and Culture Program is pleased to announce that three of its doctoral students have received a Publicly Engaged Research and Storywork Fellowship this spring. The funds for this fellowship program were earmarked by Professor Beverly Bickel, LLC Clinical Research Professor Emerita, before her retirement in 2022.

Jessica Burstrem (cohort 23) for "Interested: How Shareholder Advocacy and 50 Years of Indigenous Activism Changed the Game and the Name of the Washington Football Team." Jessica plans to use her funding to perform community-based participatory research with members of American Indian Tribal Nations in Wisconsin who were active in the shareholder advocacy phase of this movement.  

Dane Galloway (cohort 26) for "Unpacking the Home." Dane plans to use their funds to produce a short ethnographic documentary on family rituals of remembering, turning the camera homeward to capture the details and dilemmas of their own family's relocation ritual of transposing the visual family history from one set of walls to another.

Gina Lewis (cohort 25) for "Seneca Community Church Story Quilt Project." Gina plans to use her funds to support the activities and creation of a story quilt with the church community that is geographically situated within an African American descendant community in Germantown, MD, and whose cemetery is located on the grounds of the National Park Service's Seneca Stone Cutting Mill and Quarry historic site.

Do you plan events on campus? Would you like to know more about the event process or find out how to get more support for your events?

Join Event & Conference Services for a showcase of our services and capabilities in the UC Ballroom on August 6th between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.! This informational open house will show you the capabilities of our largest and most highly utilized event spaces on campus. 

We are rolling out the black and gold carpet and showing off what ECS has to offer. Staff will be on hand to answer all of your burning questions. We will also be hosting an introductory event training concurrently with our open house, from 11 a.m. to noon.

Lunch and refreshments will be served. This event is open to all UMBC staff and faculty who would like to learn more about the event planning process at UMBC.

Additionally, Ian Carroll (616/UMBC) is part of the team who created the first of many PACE Data Jupyter tutorials, "through which the PACE team [will] show and tell how to work with PACE data in Python." The first tutorial is on the Ocean Color Instrument (OCI); there also will be tutorials on HARP2 and SPEXone. This information can be found on NASA's Earthdata site.

These Q&A sessions are open to all student and will be held as follows:

Tuesday, June 18th - 11:00 a.m. - 11:45 a.m.

Monday, June 24th - 12:50 p.m. - 1:35  p.m.

Tuesday, June 25th - 12:55 p.m. - 1:40  p.m.

Students must RSVP by clicking this link to attend.