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.”

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NCURA Region II is now accepting nominations for the 2024 Cheryl-Lee Howard Mentor Me Program. The Cheryl-Lee Howard Mentor Me Program is a mentoring program providing educational and professional development opportunities for the members of the Region. We are also accepting self-nominations from those who would be interested in serving as mentors.

The Mentor Me Program provides a one-on-one, targeted approach to learning about the profession of research administration and NCURA at both the regional and national levels. The program matches a Mentee with a Mentor who has complementary skills, background, and experience to assist them in identifying leadership and professional development goals and objectives. 

MENTEES

Deadline: March 13, 2024, by 5:00pm EDT. Late applications will not be accepted.

Eligibility: Mentees must be research administrators from the Region II geographic area and must be members of NCURA at the time of nomination. Self-nominations are permitted. 

Selection: Up to five mentees will be selected for the 2024 program. Recipients are selected based on nominations received by the deadline and considered by the Region's Mentor Me Committee.

Process: Complete and submit the Application Form (also available as a Word document at Mentor Me | NCURA Region 2, scroll to the bottom under the FAQ) with a letter of support from the nominee's supervisor and one active NCURA member (from any region) to the Chair of the Mentor Me Committee, Mary Louise Healy at mhealy11@jhu.edu. 

MENTORS

If you are interested in serving as a mentor, please send your resume and a brief (no more than one page) statement describing why you would like to serve as a mentor and how you believe you can contribute in this capacity to Mary Louise Healy (mhealy11@jhu.edu). We are creating a pool of mentors to allow us to best match mentor expertise, background, and interests with those of our mentees. There is no deadline.  

For More Information: Mentor Me | NCURA Region 2