Policy Pioneer – Renato (“Renny”) DiPentima ’84 , policy sciences
Vox Popular – Christie Finn ’07, music
Hire Calling – Elliot Lasson ’87, psychology
The Virtue of Small – Michael Tully ’97, cinematic arts
Policy Pioneer – Renato (“Renny”) DiPentima ’84 , policy sciences
Vox Popular – Christie Finn ’07, music
Hire Calling – Elliot Lasson ’87, psychology
The Virtue of Small – Michael Tully ’97, cinematic arts
Check out some great web extras to accompany stories in our Fall 2014 issue, including interviews, videos and more…
Honor Roll — Read more about this year’s Alumni of the Year award winners here
Steps to the Future — Interested in learning more about UMBC’s Performing Arts and Humanities Building? Read more here.
]]>
We, the Hearts, have something to say. So we might as well sing it.
We have voices. Are you surprised?
— From “The Hearts’ Manifesto” by Christie Finn
On stage in the concert hall of UMBC’s Fine Arts Building last March, Christie Finn ’07, music was rehearsing Triptych of Gossips – a composition by UMBC professor of music Linda Dusman based on a poem by Serena Sue Hilsinger – with violinist and associate professor of music, Airi Yoshioka.
The two musicians ran through the witty and ebullient piece with Dusman, who sat in the audience with the score and helped the duo navigate more challenging passages.
Triptych of Gossips is a challenging and comic piece – a summoning and séance of sorts. It’s a perfect composition to showcase the talents of Finn – a soprano who’s made a name for herself not only as a singer of new work by rising composers, but also as a performer with the wit and flair to pull off challenging and theatrical performance work in highly inventive and colorful stagings.
Since graduating from UMBC, Finn has forged a career singing in the Unites States, in Germany and in the Netherlands. She is a two-time winner of an interpretation prize at the International Stockhausen Concerts and Courses, and has played at festivals and concert halls with numerous ensembles as well as giving solo recitals.
The field of new music and (especially) active collaboration with composers in which Finn works is particularly energetic and fertile at present, and the soprano is maintains several active collaborations – including her experimental music duo NOISE-BRIDGE with clarinetist Felix Behringer as well as work with Ensemble Hörwerk, a vocal ensemble for microtonal music, and the Vokal und Instrumental Labor Stuttgart, an experimental ensemble for music and theater. One also finds Finn singing in world premieres of operas – and self-described “comic book/sitcom” operas.
Watch Finn perform and you can see why she’s in such demand. The other piece Finn performed at UMBC in March – Georges Aperghis’ Récitations pour voix seule – is a physically demanding piece lasting over 40 minutes in 14 sections that stretches Finn’s voice from moments more spoken (or chattered) to dizzying ascents to high notes, with breaths, squeaks, and squeals woven in.
You can see videos of the Récitations and a delightful performance of another Aperghis’ piece “Sept Crimes de l’amour, by Finn and Behringer as NOISE-BRIDGE with a percussionist Phillip Lamprecht at Finn’s website (christiefinn.com). The latter composition (and performance) is especially visual, featuring moments in which the clarinet is played into a drum perched precariously on Finn’s head, and where Finn chomps down on an apple (and sings) while holding sheet music for Behringer to play.
Making a career as an American singer in Europe is a challenging path, and during her visit to UMBC, Finn delineated her trajectory for an eager class of music students hoping to follow in her path of making music both their life and their livelihood.
“You have to seize all of your opportunities,” Finn told the students. “Don’t be afraid of anything. You can always make it work somehow.”
Finn is also a graduate of the Manhattan School of Music’s Contemporary Performance Program and she took a Master of Music in Voice from Southern Methodist University. Part of making her advanced studies and career work, she added, was to find a job that matched up well with a career in the arts. Finn was a Linehan Artist Scholar as an undergraduate at UMBC.
In addition to her busy performing career, for instance, Finn also works as managing director of The Hampsong Foundation – a nonprofit organization that to promotes intercultural dialogue and understanding through song in many of its forms.
“You can have other jobs that feed your artistry,” Finn told the UMBC students. With music, she continued, “you’re choosing a lifestyle, not a career.”
As Finn continues to make waves, including a recent September appearance at the Resonant Bodies contemporary vocal musical festival in New York City (which received a glowing review in The New York Times), she credited her growth as an artist to a philosophy that accentuates the opportunities and successes over naysaying and setbacks.
“In music, you definitely get a lot of negative voices,” she told the class. “You have to find a way past that. My goal is to cover them with positive things.”
– Richard Byrne ’86
]]>
UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III takes your questions.
Q. UMBC has made immense strides as an academic institution under your leadership, and students and alumni take great pride in those achievements. What role does athletics play at UMBC – and how can we infuse our athletics program with that same pride and school spirit?
– Tim O’Ferrall ’95, interdisciplinary studies
Athletics are exciting and enlightening. One can learn a lot playing a sport about teamwork, about leadership, about discipline, about hard work, about how to lose, and how to win.
We take great pride in viewing athletics as a part of a balanced vision for the education of our students. We think about the whole student, the whole person, and that means that every student here should be viewed as someone who is here on this campus to develop his or her ability to think well and dream about the possibilities – and also to develop the skills and values necessary to reach goals.
Our women’s soccer team is an excellent example the type of experience for which we’re striving. The team finished the 2012 season last in the America East Conference. The women took lessons from their losses, supported one another, and worked hard – led by an inspirational coach who cared about them as scholars and people, not just as athletes. In one season, they went from last to first in the conference, tying for the regular season championship and winning the tournament.
This year, both Women’s and Men’s Soccer, also the defending champions, continue to do well in conference play. It’s exciting to be doing so well in soccer as its profile as one of the leading sports in the world continues to rise. More important, I am inspired by all our coaches – across sports – who care about students and their academic performance and are teaching them valuable lessons through sports.
Whether a student at UMBC is an athlete in our Division I program, or participating in an organized club sport, or highly involved in recreation and intramural sports, they are learning how to put athletics in perspective. That is an essential part of our values. We don’t want students to believe that they’re here simply to be involved in a sport. They are also learning about the need to balance schoolwork and other responsibilities with the time necessary to do well in school.
I think it is significant that we have large numbers of UMBC student athletes who excel academically. About half of our athletes are working at the Dean’s List level, and we can point to large numbers who go one to graduate and professional schools. It’s an atmosphere – and a relationship between excellence in academics and excellence in athletics – that exists at some of the most privileged schools in the country.
We have decided as an institution to invest more money in athletics in recent years. Nancy Young, vice president for student affairs, is working with me on projects including the new Events Center that will be a home for many of our teams. We are determined to be as supportive of athletics as possible. We are also delighted that we have a great athletics director in Tim Hall, as well as a fine group of coaches.
But I do think that people would say we are different from most places in that we’ve never been overwhelmed by sports. And I mean by that we’ve always understood that academics should come first and that’s the most important principle. We stand by that. And as member of the America East conference, we’re aligned with other institutions that are academically strong and that are also believers in balance between athletics and academics at a time when some would say there is not the balance we need to see across the country.
We should take great pride in the wonderful times that a variety of our athletic teams have had over the years, and in the excitement that those who followed the teams have had watching UMBC athletes. We also know that our alumni often talk about the great times they have had participating in club sports and intramural sports on this campus.
I think our challenge is to keep telling those stories and to watch as the overall story of UMBC and its spirit evolves as we reach our 50th anniversary in 2016 and beyond.
To send a question to President Hrabowski, visit www.umbc.edu/magazine
]]>
I’m happy to admit it. I’m a big Retriever sports fan.
There have been times when I have gone to extreme lengths to take in a UMBC men’s basketball game. I remember sitting in a Washington, D.C. hotel room back in March 2001, listening to online radio broadcasts of Northeast Conference tournament games involving the Retrievers.
That 2000-2001 men’s team was the first Retrievers men’s squad in a while that had come close the navigating the madness of pressure-packed early March basketball and snatching a bid to the men’s NCAA basketball tournament.
Sadly, the 2000-2001 team won only one game in the conference tournament before bowing out of contention. But the fire was lit. The 2001-2002 men’s hoops team came even closer to snatching a bid to the Big Dance, forging a 20-9 record and losing a 75-72 heartbreaker to Quinnipiac in that year’s Northeast Conference tournament.
It would take another six years and a switch to the America East Conference before the UMBC men’s hoops team threatened again to win their way onto one of the biggest stages in American sports.
The 2007-08 team fought to a 23-8 record on their way to the America East conference title. They had been forged in the heat of battles and growing pains to become a fiercely competitive squad. And when they beat Stony Brook and Vermont to earn a home game on ESPN for the conference title and a trip to the NCAA tournament, I knew that I had to make my way to the Retriever Activities Center and watch history in the making.
The crowd packed into the RAC that afternoon to watch UMBC play Hartford was as enthusiastic a crowd as has ever assembled on campus. And as the team broke away from Hartford midway through the second half, I was so proud to watch a generation of UMBC students finally get their chance to storm the court and dance at its center and celebrate a victory in front of the whole country.
This issue of UMBC Magazine focuses on UMBC’s impressive athletics program – both the glories of its past and an interview about the program’s present and future with athletics director Tim Hall.
Our look at the past of UMBC athletics reveals a university that’s always had successes. (And even a Division II national championship!) The university’s women’s teams have been equal partners in the program’s successes and strengths. And UMBC’s athletes have accomplished it all at a school that emphasizes the “scholar” part of “scholar-athlete.”
The notion that UMBC athletics is woven inextricably into the inclusive excellence of the university makes its successes even sweeter – and worth celebrating.
– Richard Byrne ’86
]]>
Michael Tully ’97, cinematic arts, is a professional screenwriter. Or at least he was – until last month.
Tully’s paychecks for writing his next feature, Don’t Leave Home, ran out on October 1. And if things go according to plan, he will fly to Ireland in April to start drawing a salary as director of that film – a spooky psychological thriller in the vein of David Lynch’s Lost Highway or Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now – for a full year.
Which still leaves Tully with a half-year gap in employment. He had a steady gig for several years as the chief writer/editor of the arthouse film website Hammer to Nail, but he’s given that up to devote himself full time to making movies.
“That’s the scary/fun part of filmmaking,” he says by phone from his home in Austin, Texas, where he moved from New York City in 2012 when his wife, Holly Herrick, landed a job with the Austin Film Society. “It’s always a hustle. You’ve never really arrived.”
An observer could be forgiven for believing that he has. Septien, Tully’s genre-defying feature about three troubled brothers living together on a farm, was an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival in 2011. IFC bought it for $80,000, allowing Tully to pay off the $15,000 in production costs he’d put on his own credit card – and also pay back his parents and the friends who’d kicked in – within six months of shooting.
It was a happy ending for a movie Tully made “as a sort of lark middle finger to the film industry.” Septien broke every one of the dispiriting rules Tully was hearing at film festival panel discussions: Pick an easy-to-identify genre, don’t cast yourself, don’t spend your own money, and choose a title starting with A or B so video-on-demand viewers won’t have to scroll too far down their menu.
Tully’s much warmer, yet still idiosyncratic follow-up, the semi-autobiographical ’80s-set comedy Ping Pong Summer, also played at Sundance this year. Shot on location in Ocean City for a thrifty $1 million, Tully nonetheless managed to snag an honest-to-god movie star, Susan Sarandon, for a pivotal role, one he’d written with the legendary German filmmaker Werner Herzog in mind.
Tully’s pal Jay Duplass, who directed the Oscar-winning actress in Jeff Who Lives at Home, passed the script to Sarandon and vouched for Tully’s worthiness. It helped that the character, Randi Jammer, is a retired champion of pingpong, a sport close to Sarandon’s heart: She’s a partner in SPiN, a chain of pingpong clubs in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, and Dubai.
Tully’s first feature as director, 2006’s Cocaine Angel, didn’t come until almost a decade after he’d graduated from UMBC’s film department. His UMBC education had given him a grounding in the physical details of film production, but when it came to getting an internship or learning to navigate the financial subtleties of filmmaking, he was largely on his own. “And I liked that,” he says.
But even small movies still cost a lot of money in the late ’90s. “It wasn’t as easy as saying, ‘I’m going to get a Panasonic DVX and get my buddies and make a movie,’” Tully recalls. “Which is finally what I did when I turned 30, with Cocaine Angel. It was a lot of being insecure and not having the confidence to take the plunge.”
Learning to believe in yourself is a big theme of Ping Pong Summer, a picture Tully sums up as “an experiment in combining my own life with the movies I loved in the ’80s” – teen comedies like Better Off Dead and National Lampoon’s Vacation – “and really trying to make an artifact film that feels like a lost movie from 1985.”
Thanks to his father, Tully has an Irish passport – which makes him a native filmmaker in the eyes of the Irish Film Board (IFB), eligible not just for tax rebates but for potentially several hundred thousand dollars in production funds too.
Tully was initially wary of claiming to be an Irish artist, but a talk with a gentleman from the IFB straightened him out. “He said, ‘People have come in here with accents stranger than yours,’” Tully laughs.
Don’t Leave Home will be another step on the progression that Ping Pong Summer began, stirring Tully’s idiosyncrasies into the tropes of a beloved genre.
“More and more,” Tully says, “I’m like: ‘Can you make something that feels soulful and earnest out of a premise that is just absolute movie hokum!’” Fingers crossed, he’ll have at least a year to figure that out. And get paid for it, too.
– Chris Klimek
]]>
UMBC’s leadership in fostering the success of students seeking degrees in the sciences, technology, engineering and math (STEM) was highlighted in October when the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced a groundbreaking series of awards totaling more than $18 million for the university.
The awards were part of a $240 million, five-year NIH investment to enhance diversity in the biomedical research workforce called Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (or, BUILD). Bill LaCourse, dean of the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences, and UMBC Provost Philip Rous, together serve as the award’s principal investigators and will direct the STEM BUILD@UMBC initiative.
Unlike programs that focus on supporting students at extreme ends of the achievement curve, STEM BUILD@UMBC will focus on high-potential students who are at risk for not completing their STEM degrees but who, with extra support, are likely to succeed. The university will collaborate with five community colleges, Gallaudet University, and the University of Maryland School of Medicine in this initiative, which will combine innovation with the leveraging of effective components of existing UMBC programs to create a multifaceted new student support model.
A White House College Opportunity Initiative workshop held in September at UMBC revealed a demand for well-evaluated approaches to improving STEM education nationwide, as many U.S. universities struggle with lagging retention rates and achievement gaps.
– Dinah Winnick
John W. Dorsey, the third Chancellor of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, passed away in July at the age of 78. Dorsey died at his home in Laurel of respiratory failure.
Dorsey was named as UMBC Chancellor in 1977. He came to UMBC from the University of Maryland, College Park, where he had held a number of academic leadership positions in the 1970s, including Vice Chancellor of Administrative Affairs and Acting Chancellor (1974-1975). Dorsey served as Chancellor at UMBC until 1986, overseeing nine years in which the university boosted its enrollment and significantly raised its academic profile.
A key element in Dorsey’s legacy was the stability he brought to a university whose development after its founding in 1966 had not been without growing pains, including the resignation of the university’s second Chancellor Calvin B. T. Lee under acrimonious circumstances in 1976.
Dorsey arrived at a moment when UMBC was under the constant threat of a significant revision or even termination of its mission as a public research institution. One of Dorsey’s most notable moments as Chancellor came in 1981, when local media reported that Sheldon Knorr, the executive director of the Maryland Higher Education Commission, was preparing a proposal that UMBC be shut down and converted into an industrial park.
The reports created a firestorm on campus, and Chancellor Dorsey rallied the university community at a large public meeting held in the UMBC dining hall with a stinging rejection of the scheme – which never reached formal consideration
UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, observes that Dorsey “was the protector and supporter of UMBC. When the university found itself and its future being questioned, he was the one who said we must protect this great institution because the people of the state need UMBC.”
Dorsey came to the job with an intimate knowledge of Maryland’s university system and its politics and tensions, and he usually preferred taking a quieter approach to building his lasting achievements on campus. Dorsey’s “wonderful, understated approach” was a key to his success, says Hrabowski, who adds that “it’s easy to see why the university went to the next level under his strong leadership.”
Shortly after his appointment as Chancellor, Dorsey commenced a sweeping internal reorganization of the university’s administrative and political governance which simplified and clarified UMBC’s structure and paved the way for sustainable growth. And far from shutting down or altering its core mission, UMBC’s enrollment grew steadily over Dorsey’s nine-year tenure and surged past the 6,000 mark in his last year as Chancellor.
Upon his departure from UMBC in 1986, Dorsey returned to College Park as a special assistant to President John S. Toll. He also returned to teaching economics and retired from College Park in 2001.
An alumnus of College Park with a B.S. in economics (1958), Dorsey also had a master’s degree and a doctorate in economics from Harvard University.
– Richard Byrne
Each year at Homecoming, UMBC’s Alumni Association bestows its Alumni of the Year awards to notable graduates of the university, and the select group of this year’s honorees was among the most impressive yet.
This year’s ceremony was held in the recently-opened second phase of the university’s Performing Arts and Humanities Building, and the 2014 award winners included:
Claudia Pearce ’89 M.S. and ’94 Ph.D., computer science (Engineering and Information Technology), a senior computer science authority at the NSA.
Donna Lewis ’86, English (Humanities), a cartoonist with the Washington Post News Service and Syndicate and the unit chief of the Office of Professional Responsibility, Transportation Security Administration in the Department of Homeland Security.
Michael Adelstein ’96, biochemistry and molecular biology (Natural and Mathematical Sciences), CEO of Potomac Photonics, Inc.
Kaliope Parthemos ’93, psychology (Social and Behavioral Sciences), chief of staff in the office of Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.
Hadieh Shafie ’04 M.F.A., imaging and digital arts (Visual and Performing Arts), independent artist.
Gib Mason ’95, economics (Distinguished Service) chief operating officer and director of the Center for Leadership and Innovation, UMBC Training Centers.
Isaac Kinde ’05, biological sciences (Rising Star), M.D./Ph.D. candidate, The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
The Alumni Association also honored Anne Spence, professor of the practice in mechanical engineering, with the association’s inaugural Outstanding Faculty Award.
– Richard Byrne ‘86
]]>
Lisa Kakavas ’94, psychology, spends her days working as textbook manager in the UMBC Bookstore. At night and on weekends, however, you’ll find her out in the field with her sable German shepherd, Zildjian (or “Z” for short), working with Mason-Dixon Rescue Dogs. Kakavas is president of the all-volunteer group, which trains dogs – and their owners – to seek and find missing people, both alive and dead.
How do you transform a dog from lovable companion to hard-working rescue/recovery K9?
Step 1: FIND A TEAM TO TRAIN WITH
“There are numerous search and rescue groups around Maryland, and they are generally very open to helping newbies get started,” says Kakavas. She advises starting with a web search to identify groups that are close to where you live. You’ll likely be invited to a field day – most groups hold regular weekly sessions – and meet everyone involved in the group to see if you’re a good fit for that team. Training a rescue dog is a rigorous, long-term project, and it’s important that both the group’s location and overall zeitgeist work for you. “You’ll be spending a lot of pretty intense time with these folks,” Kakavas observes.
Step 2: LEARN FIELD SKILLS
Interestingly, the first step in training a search and rescue dog does not involve an actual canine. “You need to solidify certain skills yourself, as a handler, before you can start teaching your dog,” says Kakavas. On the learning curve: navigation with map, compass and GPS. You’ll also study search strategy – i.e., how to evaluate an area of land to devise the most effective and efficient search approach, since “when you’re looking for a live individual, time is of the essence” – and “scent theory,” or understanding how terrain, weather patterns and even vegetation affect how a search target’s scent disperses in the landscape.
This initial human training period varies, depending upon the individual’s previous outdoors experience and how much time they can devote to what is ultimately a volunteer gig. “The ballpark is about one year,” Kakavas says.
Step 3: CHOOSE YOUR DOG
Ideally, those interested in learning to do search and rescue acquire the dog after they’ve established their own skills. “This way you get to see a multitude of working dogs and start to understand what breed you’d like to work with, what makes a good search dog,” she says. Although many rescue canines come from certain working breeds like German shepherds, border collies, and Labrador retrievers, Kakavas says that any pup – so long as it is less than two years old – has potential. A dog’s particular characteristics are more important than its breed. “Look for a dog that is independent yet sociable, tractable, eager to learn, agile, and fearless,” she says. “And has a good nose!”
Step 4: EARN “THE PAYCHECK”
While a handler’s motivation is abstract – help the community, save lives, bring a loved one home to their family – dogs are motivated by food and play. Search and rescue training is built around the “paycheck” of a treat or some tug of war as a reward for performing tasks. Training a dog to certification level typically requires one to two years, when working at it part time, and involves activities like “runaways” which use the handler and a volunteer “subject” for the dog to find. “The subject runs away maybe 30 feet, which kicks in the dog’s natural prey drive even as they can still see the person,” Kakavas explains. Every time the dog goes to a subject, it is rewarded with a very vigorous playtime. The distance gets longer and longer, until eventually the subject is out of the dog’s sight. The dog by this time understands the need to find a person in order to get their reward, thus naturally transitioning from sight to scent in order to go collect that paycheck.
“Training is essentially coupling the dog’s natural drives with a reward, over and over again until it’s deeply automatic,” says Kakavas. “Our dogs are searching for any human scent. No matter who is out there in the field, the dogs will find them, which we want: even if it’s not the missing person, it is someone who is a potential witness.”
Step 5: DON’T FORGET TO HAVE FUN
Doing searches, which can be long and grueling, must also be fun for both dog and handler. Especially the dogs: if it’s not fun, they simply won’t do it. Fortunately, says Kakavas, search and rescue is the canine equivalent of a big game of hide and seek. And the handler? “Just watching that dog do a job it is born to do, just the way you’ve trained them to do it – that is the human paycheck.”
TOOLS OF THE TRADE
By The Numbers
Amount of area searched: Anywhere from a few hundred square feet to 80 acres.
Number of years Kakavas has been training dogs and doing rescue and recovery: 14.
Furthest Kakavas has ever traveled to do a search: 3,500 miles, searching for a lost hiker in Peru.
Number of searches Kakavas and Z have done in their five years of working together: more than 50.
– Michelle Gienow
]]>