Port Discovery Children’s Museum, one of the top Children’s Museum in the United States and a top cultural institution in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, is seeking a creative educator and leader to be our Learning & Visitor Experience Director. The mission of Port Discovery is to connect purposeful play with learning. If our mission resonates with you, and you have a public programming background as well as enjoy the joy and wonder of children as they learn, then we welcome you to apply!

Position Summary:

Port Discovery Children’s Museum is one of the top Children’s Museums in the United States and a top cultural institution in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. Our mission is to educate children through play and to inspire life-long learning. We are seeking a dependable, composed, and welcoming individual to join our team as our full-time Museum Safety Associate. The Safety Associate is responsible for the daily safety and security operations of the museum.

NASA's PACE spacecraft launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station's Space Launch Complex 40 at 1:33 a.m. EST Thursday, February 8! Congratulations to all, including everyone at ESI, who were involved with HARP2! 

The three instruments onboard are key parts of the PACE spacecraft: Ocean Color Instrument (OCI) and the two polarimeters, Spectro-polarimeter for Planetary Exploration (SPEXone) and Hyper Angular Rainbow Polarimeter #2 (HARP2); which was built at UMBC's Earth and Space Institute. Learn more about these instruments in this visualization by the NASA GSFC Scientific Visualization Studio: "PACE orbit with swaths and instrument fields of view." 

View the launch and learn more about the mission here on YouTube: "SpaceX Falcon 9 Launches NASA's PACE-Payload." Be sure to keep up with the PACE spacecraft mission on the PACE mission blog!

(Photo credit: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio)

The positive environmental and health impacts of work led by Upal Ghosh, professor of chemical, biochemical, and environmental engineering at UMBC, was recently highlighted by the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). The agency showcased a low-cost technology that Ghosh and his colleagues developed to clean waterways contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), a group of likely carcinogenic chemicals that were used in insulation, coolants, and electrical equipment for decades before being banned in the U.S. in 1979. 

The chemicals are stable and persist in the environment, often accumulating in fish that live in contaminated waterways and posing a risk to humans who consume those fish. NIEHS funded Ghosh’s research into using activated carbon pellets to bind the chemicals in place at the bottom of the waterways. This prevents the PCBs from circulating through the aquatic food chain. In projects carried out in contaminated lakes, rivers, and harbors in Delaware, Maryland, and elsewhere, Ghosh’s team demonstrated that the technique could significantly reduce the concentration of PCBs in the water and in aquatic lifeforms. Importantly, the technique is also significantly cheaper than standard clean-up approaches, such as dredging and disposing of contaminated sediment. 

In related work performed with Kevin Sowers, from the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology, Ghosh’s team also developed a way to combine the activated carbon with microbes that break down PCBs, reducing their toxicity.

With NIEHS support, Ghosh has co-founded two companies—Sediment Solutions and RemBac—to commercialize the technology and deploy it at full-scale to clean up contaminated sites across the country, such as at Mirror Lake in Delaware.

“The technology brings together innovations in material science and biology,” says Ghosh. It’s an honor, he says, that the NIEHS, the leading agency in the country that funds research on public health and the environment, recognized “the real impact our research is having on improving public health.”