Hello everyone!

We hope you enjoyed Winter Break! We're excited to announce that our first GBM will be held on Monday, February 12th, from 12-1pm. Our meeting location is SOND 112. We will be reintroducing our E-board officers, getting to know you all, going over some general goals for the semester, as well as learning some basic human anatomy. We hope to see you all there!

The All of Us Research Program, an initiative spearheaded by the National Institutes of Health, aims to accelerate health research discoveries that enable individualized healthcare by building one of the world's largest and most diverse databases for health research. 

The All of Us Research Program database offers access to a diverse, longitudinal dataset that can be used by students and faculty who may not have access to other datasets. 

The NIH has worked with research communities and community members to ensure a robust research protocol that respects participants and the needs of the research community. This dataset includes biological and social determinants of health data on a large, inclusive scale, that follows participants as they move, age, and grow. 

Researchers with access to the All of Us Researcher Workbench will have the potential to facilitate studies that could lead to new insight, treatment, and strategies for disease prevention that are tailored to individuals. 

Join us for an information session to learn more about the research program, including more information on the datasets, how to get registered, and the required training to gain access!

Wednesday, February 28, 2024 | 12 - 1 pm (virtual)

Click here to visit the library's event post and to join.

Thursday, March 14, 2024 | 12 - 1 pm (virtual)

Join us for a virtual seminar by Dr. Greg McFarquhar, Director of the Cooperative Institute for Severe and High Impact Weather Research and Operations and faculty member of the School of Meteorology at University of Oklahoma. His talk is titled "Use of Airborne Cloud Measurements and Model Simulations to Inform About Ice Multiplication."

Date and Time: Thursday, February 8, 2024 at 11:00am

Join us via Teams.

Abstract: 

Biography:

Greg McFarquhar received his B.Sc. in mathematics and physics from the University of Toronto, Canada in 1987. Thereafter, he changed his field of study to atmospheric sciences and received his M.Sc. (1989) and Ph.D. (1993) also from the University of Toronto, but specializing in cloud physics. Greg spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, California (1993-94) and worked at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado (1995-2001; 2015-16), the University of Illinois (2001-17) and the University Blaise Pascal in Clermont, France (2012) before joining the faculty at the University of Oklahoma in Aug. 2017 where he also serves as Director of the Cooperative Institute for Severe and High Impact Weather Research and Operations (CIWRO). He is a former chair of the American Meteorological Society Committee on Cloud Physics and currently President of the International Commission on Clouds and Precipitation. He is the chief editor for the American Meteorological Society's Monographs Collection, an associate editor for the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, and has active research grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy (DOE), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). He has formerly served as the Chief Scientist for the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program's Aerial Facilities (AAF). He has 237 publications in the refereed literature, an h-index of 65, and he and his group have made over 750 presentations at conferences and working group meetings. He has participated in or led 37 different air- or ship-based cloud measurement field campaigns, and is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and of the American Geophysical Union.

For more information on the GESTAR II Seminar Series, click here.

The UMBC Faculty Development Center will hold a one hour online session on Encouraging Academic Integrity in the Era of AI vis WebEx from 12-1 pm on February 14, 2024.

While fostering and maintaining academic integrity has always been an important goal of instruction at UMBC, advances in "the other AI" -- artificial intelligence -- has complicated this effort. Students are not always aware of what constitutes plagiarism where tools such as ChatGPT are concerned. Meanwhile, faculty often feel pressure to ensure that students meet course learning objectives and also help them learn how to use AI tools ethically and responsibly. The fact that effective tools to detect students' usage of AI in completing assignments do not currently exist further complicates the academic integrity landscape. 

In this session we will revisit best practices in course, syllabus, and assignment design in light of the opportunities and temptations that generative AI tools present. Faculty will learn how to make their policies around AI use clear to students and will gain strategies for dissuading students from inappropriate use of these tools.