The submission deadline for Volume 43 is tonight at 11:59pm! Best of luck to everyone with the submission process. Have a great evening and good luck with finals!
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Thank you everyone that attended today's lunch. Here are some the items we discussed.
Also, there is still time to add your 2023 achievements to our website.
Wishing you all a great end of the semester! y ¡Felices Fiestas!
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Events this year:
1. Latinx/ Hispanic Heritage Month Talk – Humanities Forum / Dresher Center.
- Julián Delgado Lopera – Colombian Writer.
- We co-sponsored with other departments the talk and a writing workshop for students.
- September 21st, 2023.
2. Maya Quilolo Artist’s talk, a Brazilian artist and researcher born in Maroon, a quilombola community in Minas Gerais, Brazil.
- Artist’s talk at the Dresher Center. Attended by students and faculty.
- Co-sponsored with other departments.
- Wednesday, November 15th. 2023.
3. LHFA / Meet and Greet / Día de Muertos
- 55 people attended, students, faculty, and staff.
- President Sheares Ashby was there, she made it a point to say our annual “meet and greet” event it’s a “must attend” for her.
- Student orgs shared info. This was great and something we can keep repeating.
- Very festive and fun. Something worth repeating in a bigger space next year and with more food.
- The Latinx / Hispanic org wants us to collaborate with them next year to put together a “Día de Muertos community ofrenda table.” They did it this year alone but would like to do it with us next year.
4. Co-sponsored: "Performance and Discussion: La bella en su jaula." A joint event between UMBC and Morgan State University.
- Our colleague María Manni/ MLLI organized this event on campus.
- It was an opportunity for our students to learn about Latin American theater and its history.
Other relevant events/news:
- LHFA Beginning of the year lunch / meeting. We met new Latinx/ Hispanic faculty. We have 3 new members this 2023-2024 academic year. As of now we have 38 members/ faculty that identify as Latinx/Hispanic.
- We have a Discord Channel! Help us keep it alive.
- Our website has been updated. Finally. Check it out! Thanks, Henrique, for all the updates.
Upcoming events/projects/info:
- LHFA Logo competition. Winter Competition, $100 prize for the winner. We will be sharing the flyer for this soon. Please share with your networks.
- May 1st – Immigrant Day event. We will need help to plan. Let us know if you or your department itself would like to collaborate or sponsor. We will use some ideas from past Immigrant Days on campus.
- We are starting to receive requests to meet with job candidates. If you are willing to meet with candidates next semester, please let María Sánchez or Thania know. It is usually a half hour meeting online or in person. We discuss LHFA and answer questions from candidates that identify as Latinx/Hispanic and have requested a meeting with us as part of their campus visit.
- We are planning again a Promotion and Tenure workshop during the spring semester. Do you have topics, dates, in mind for this? Let us know.
- Our budget for next semester is: $1,520.45
- As a reminder, please let us know if you would like to discuss a retention and/or promotion issue with us. We would like to know how your experience is going at UMBC and if we can help in anyway.
Faculty news / Mural de los Éxitos:
Check our website for links and pictures. (coming soon!)
Fernando Vonhoof received "The Black & Latine/x Excellence Award" from the I3B and the Mosaic Center last May.
Drs. Sandra Barrueco, Rebecca Schacht, & Pamela Rakhshan Rouhakhtar from the Department of Psychology have been awarded a $990,497 grant from the federal Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). It is entitled "Advancements in Integrated, Culturally and Linguistically Competent Behavioral Health Services for Children, Adolescents and Young Adults in Maryland’s Underserved and Rural Communities".
https://sites.google.com/umbc.edu/bienestar/bienestarwellbeing-lab
Jennifer Mata-McMahon published in multiple prestigious academic journals/books and attended conferences to share her research on Children’s Spirituality in Early Childhood Education. Check out her publications on our website, with pictures!
Ana Oskoz, professor of Spanish, has accepted an appointment as vice provost for Faculty Affairs.
Carlos A. Romero Talamás gave a Grit- X talk on Ocober 14th, 2023: "The Fusion Energy Solution – Why Engineering Simplicity Matters"
Thania Muñoz D. was promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure at the Department of Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication in June 2023.
Yolanda González Mendoza coauthored the book, Abolishing Poverty: Towards Pluriverse Futures and Politics. University of Georgia. 2023.
Please share with us your 2023 news here! ]]>
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Published: Nov 20, 2023
More than 110 academic researchers, industry pros, government officials and educators met at the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology (IMET) for the second annual Sustainable Aquaculture Systems Supporting Atlantic Salmon (SAS2) conference in October. The conference’s nine panel discussions (with more than 50 panelists), local field trips and tours, and social events gave stakeholders the opportunity to share progress and address remaining challenges to move the aquaculture industry forward.
Yonathan Zohar, professor of marine biotechnology at UMBC and IMET, leads the SAS2 consortium, which includes 32 co-investigators, 12 research institutions, and 11 industry partners, from around the U.S. and internationally.
Salmon is consumed more than any other fish in the U.S., but over 90 percent of it is imported at a value of $3.8 billion annually, Zohar shared in introductory remarks. People across sectors are interested in reducing this trade deficit and improving environmental sustainability of salmon aquaculture by eliminating the carbon footprint associated with transporting salmon from overseas. As a result, domestic salmon aquaculture is experiencing an investment boom, Zohar says. The investment is particularly strong for land-based aquaculture, which Zohar and colleagues are advancing at IMET’s Aquaculture Research Center (ARC).
“This is a stakeholder-driven program,” Zohar says. “Industry and academia are engaged in genuine brainstorming towards enabling salmon aquaculture in the U.S. to be a success story.”
University System of Maryland Chancellor Jay Perman shared that the SAS2 team’s efforts, from biotechnology to market strategies to workforce development and education, “are poised to change the face of food scarcity and food production the world over.”
Conference attendees gather in front of the Institute for Marine and Environmental Technology. (Image by Barry Freeman)The work at IMET has been critical to move the industry forward worldwide. The SAS2 initiative, awarded $10 million by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2021, builds on the Recirculating Aquaculture Salmon Network, also led by Zohar and funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Sea Grant Office.
IMET, and the ARC in particular, are “a showcase of our best ideas, ideas that promise solutions to so many essential challenges—food security, environmental sustainability, economic resilience,” Perman shared. The SAS2 consortium is “research for the public good,” Perman added. “That’s our mission and this project is emblematic of that.”
Session topics at the conference included scientific and engineering challenges like waste remediation, water reuse, and managing the salmon life cycle in captivity. Other sessions discussed market research for salmon produced on land and examples of education programs that increase awareness of aquaculture careers.
Attendees also traveled to The Conservation Fund Freshwater Institute in West Virginia to see collaborative SAS2 research, visited Baltimore City Schools that incorporate aquaculture into the curriculum, toured the ARC, and heard from graduate students contributing to the research arm of SAS2.
“SAS2 is an amazing accomplishment—the best example of public-private partnership to solve problems for industry,” shares Steve Summerfelt, a conference panelist and the chief science officer at Superior Fresh, which raises land-based salmon and recycles the nutrient-rich wastewater to grow greens. “SAS2 is providing relevant and groundbreaking research with strong tech transfer to help land-based salmon farmers.”
Conference attendees took tours of the Aquaculture Research Center, the land-based salmon production facility at IMET led by Yonathan Zohar. (Image by Melissa Penley Cormier, M.F.A. ’17)Overall, the conference emphasized aquaculture’s important and growing role in worldwide food production.
“Land-based, sustainable production of seafood is critically important technology to meet the rapidly growing need for healthy seafood as a source of protein in diets worldwide,” Russell Hill, director of IMET, said. “A land-based approach has huge advantages for minimizing pollution in the coastal environment and taking pressure off wild fish populations—and all of this can be done through this resilient technology that’s also adaptable in the face of a changing planet.”
By bringing together people from across industries, the event created opportunities that will enable more breakthroughs.
“The lively engagement and productive brainstorming of all relevant sectors led to several innovative ideas and collaborations which will contribute in the short term to making Atlantic salmon farming in the U.S. and globally more environmentally responsible and economically feasible” concluded Zohar. “Everyone left inspired and excited about the opportunities being created by the SAS2 program for innovative and sustainable aquaculture.”
Tags: CNMS, MarineBiotech, Research
- If you are traveling this month, make sure you have a travel signature on your DS-2019!
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UMBC is continuing its commitment to diversifying Maryland’s biomedical and life sciences ecosystem through its latest collaborative effort with the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) to develop a new life sciences accelerator program focused on faculty development and research commercialization efforts.
UMBC and UMB were jointly awarded a four-year, $4 million Research Evaluation and Commercialization Hubs (REACH) grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to advance the biomedical entrepreneurship and innovation economy in the Baltimore region. This grant will be used to build on the work that began when UMBC and the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) received a $13 million NIH Common Fund Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST) grant in 2022 to enhance recruitment and training of junior faculty from groups underrepresented in biomedical science.
“We have a long-term commitment to enhance the diversity of the faculty on our two campuses in the biomedical and life sciences,” says Karl V. Steiner, UMBC’s vice president of research and creative achievement and co-principal investigator of the new REACH grant. “We are pleased to further strengthen the close partnership with our colleagues at UMB and beyond with this next initiative.”
Karl V. Steiner.
The REACH grant will fund up to 44 early-career faculty and students from UMBC and UMB (11 each year) with up to $100,000 each to develop and test commercially-promising biomedical and life science technologies. Additionally, UMB will use a portion of the grant funding to create the University of Maryland, Baltimore Life Science Discovery (UM-BILD) Accelerator Program’s “proof-of-concept” hub that will be housed at the University of Maryland BioPark and at the bwtech@UMBC Research and Technology Park. The UM-BILD hub, set to launch next year, is one of only five REACH hubs awarded funding across the nation.
Aaron Miscenich, executive director of bwtech@UMBC, explains that bwtech@UMBC has done extensive work in developing a strong community centered around entrepreneurship and technology commercialization.
“UMBC’s partnership with UMB to create this technology commercialization hub will [further] enhance our work and bring additional support to UMBC’s research community,” Miscenich says. “It’s a great opportunity to bring together UMBC faculty and students with resources that can help further develop promising technologies and help them to grow into thriving businesses.”
bwtech@UMBC Research and Technology Park, north campus.
UMSOM’s Jason Rose, principal investigator of the REACH grant, shared how both institutions plan to support the biotech entrepreneurs who take part in the accelerator program.
“We recognize that to create our own unique cohort of newly trained biotech entrepreneurs here in Baltimore, our accelerator will need to provide them with both research support and funding, as well as guidance through the process of commercialization and technology development,” Rose said in a UMSOM press release. “We will be providing mentoring and educational programs from a diverse set of successful life science innovators and leaders to help distill their broad experiences—from navigating FDA regulatory pathways to financing new companies—to all of those who interact with the hub.”
This initiative, Steiner adds, aims to increase the number of Black and Latinx entrepreneurs in the biomedical and life sciences.
“As we look at the makeup of entrepreneurs across our communities, it’s obvious that we are under-serving those underserved communities. This will be yet another building block in our joint commitment to ensure that we focus on and benefit from the breadth of entrepreneurial talent in Maryland,” says Steiner. “We’re looking to bring in more individuals from underrepresented communities into the faculty ranks and actively help them develop a strong network of peers and mentors to allow them to successfully build their careers and their businesses in Maryland, with support from UMBC with bwtech and support from UMB.”
UMBC President Valerie Sheares Ashby shares that “we are excited to work together to create opportunities for everyone to benefit from and contribute to this innovation ecosystem, staying true to our long-held commitment to inclusive excellence.”
Wendy Martin.
Wendy Martin, director of UMBC’s Office of Technology Development, will assist in selecting and managing the projects that will be funded through the REACH grant. Martin has worked closely with faculty in all aspects of intellectual property protection and commercialization, including helping faculty to receive internal and external funding to develop new products. Those funding opportunities have included UMBC’s long-standing partnership with TEDCO’s Maryland Innovation Initiative (MII), which will also be a collaborator of the UM-BILD accelerator along with the University of Maryland, College Park, Morgan State University, and Blackbird Laboratories.
Since launching in 2012, MII has supported 39 UMBC faculty in their commercialization pursuits, including the development of bendable zinc-based batteries and vibration-powered sensor technology for wind turbines.
“I’m excited that we can bring everyone to the table. UMBC provides a continuum of support for these commercialization projects,” says Martin. “We’re building on enhancing things that we’re already doing. It’s great that we will have these additional resources to keep it going and to do it better.”
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