Students at the University of Maryland College Park, your chance to attend a Dissertation House is here!

The on-campus setting provides Dissertation House participants with productive and rewarding scholastic engagement. Students who participate in this program will spend each day thinking, writing, and sharing ideas about their doctoral dissertations. Students will learn effective time-management skills, learn how to set small manageable goals, and meet with a dissertation coach in one-on-one consultations to discuss and address obstacles that might prevent them from completing their degrees.

This is a Tuesday – Friday  (9 a.m. – 5 p.m., non-residential) commitment to focus on the doctoral dissertation. TheDissertation House activities focus on areas where students typically have difficulty: conceptualizing a topic, writing a literature review, transitioning from a proposal to a dissertation, analyzing data, writing the last chapter, and editing.

To apply to attend the Summer 2014 Dissertation House at College Park, submit a brief description (maximum 2 pages, font size 11-12 point, 1-inch margins) that describes the project that you wish to accomplish during the Dissertation House period. Please use the following guidelines: (i) Summary of the project, including research question(s), data or texts, and method; (ii)Amount completed on the project to date; and (iii) Any obstacles that you are encountering that hinder completion of the dissertation. Include the following header information with the description:

• Name / Address / Telephone numbers (home, office, and fax) / E-mail address
• Academic Program and Year in the program
• Expected date of doctoral degree completion

Dates/Location: July 15-18, 2014, Stamp Student Union, University of Maryland, College Park. Lunch and snacks will be provided daily.

Application Period: Thursday, May 22, 2014 – Thursday, June 19, 2014. Email applications to amperez@umd.edu   Please use the words “Dissertation House” in the subject line of your email.

Selection Process: Sixteen participants will be selected for participation in the Dissertation House. The following applicants will have priority: (i) Applicants who plan to finish the Ph.D. in 2014; (ii) Individuals who are working on dissertations and theses rather than a proposal; (iii) Applicants who submit earliest; and (iv) Individuals who appear most able to benefit from the services offered at the Dissertation House.

If your application is accepted, you will receive an acceptance notice via email and additional details about the Dissertation House.

_____________________________________________

 The Dissertation House at College Park is for graduate students of any discipline at the University of Maryland College Park. If you are a graduate student (in any discipline) at UMBC, please apply for the Dissertation House at UMBC: http://dissertationhouse.wordpress.com/2014/05/18/the-summer-dissertation-house-at-umbc-begins-in-july-applications-are-being-accepted-now/. Graduate students in STEM fields at other school within the USM will have an opportunity to participate in the Dissertation House at the PROMISE Summer Success Institute in August 2014.

Students at the University of Maryland College Park, your chance to attend a Dissertation House is here!

The on-campus setting provides Dissertation House participants with productive and rewarding scholastic engagement. Students who participate in this program will spend each day thinking, writing, and sharing ideas about their doctoral dissertations. Students will learn effective time-management skills, learn how to set small manageable goals, and meet with a dissertation coach in one-on-one consultations to discuss and address obstacles that might prevent them from completing their degrees.

This is a Tuesday – Friday  (9 a.m. – 5 p.m., non-residential) commitment to focus on the doctoral dissertation. TheDissertation House activities focus on areas where students typically have difficulty: conceptualizing a topic, writing a literature review, transitioning from a proposal to a dissertation, analyzing data, writing the last chapter, and editing.

To apply to attend the Summer 2014 Dissertation House at College Park, submit a brief description (maximum 2 pages, font size 11-12 point, 1-inch margins) that describes the project that you wish to accomplish during the Dissertation House period. Please use the following guidelines: (i) Summary of the project, including research question(s), data or texts, and method; (ii)Amount completed on the project to date; and (iii) Any obstacles that you are encountering that hinder completion of the dissertation. Include the following header information with the description:

• Name / Address / Telephone numbers (home, office, and fax) / E-mail address
• Academic Program and Year in the program
• Expected date of doctoral degree completion

Dates/Location: July 15-18, 2014, Stamp Student Union, University of Maryland, College Park. Lunch and snacks will be provided daily.

Application Period: Thursday, May 22, 2014 – Thursday, June 19, 2014. Email applications to amperez@umd.edu   Please use the words “Dissertation House” in the subject line of your email.

Selection Process: Sixteen participants will be selected for participation in the Dissertation House. The following applicants will have priority: (i) Applicants who plan to finish the Ph.D. in 2014; (ii) Individuals who are working on dissertations and theses rather than a proposal; (iii) Applicants who submit earliest; and (iv) Individuals who appear most able to benefit from the services offered at the Dissertation House.

If your application is accepted, you will receive an acceptance notice via email and additional details about the Dissertation House.

_____________________________________________

 The Dissertation House at College Park is for graduate students of any discipline at the University of Maryland College Park. If you are a graduate student (in any discipline) at UMBC, please apply for the Dissertation House at UMBC: https://dissertationhouse.wordpress.com/2014/05/18/the-summer-dissertation-house-at-umbc-begins-in-july-applications-are-being-accepted-now/. Graduate students in STEM fields at other school within the USM will have an opportunity to participate in the Dissertation House at the PROMISE Summer Success Institute in August 2014.

Nature in the Dark, which features work by Tim Nohe, Visual Arts, CIRCA, and originally screened in Melbourne at Federation Square in 2012, will appear in new venues soon: at the Gertrude Street Projection Festival in Melbourne, Australia (18-27 July 2014), and at the Visual Arts Centre in Bendigo, Australia (14 August – 5 October 2014). Nohe’s piece, At The Wall of the Anthropocene, is an animation set to an original film score created in collaboration with Tim Bubb, IMDA.

Nature in the Dark is a collaborative program produced by the Centre for Creative Arts, La Trobe University and the Victoria National Parks Association.

CIRCA is currently collaborating with the Centre for Creative Arts, Marnie Benny of the MICA Curatorial Practices Program, Australian/German curator Jan Hendrik Brüggemeier, UMBC visual and performing artists and multiple partners in the Inner Harbor to produce a second edition of the program focused on marine life. This program will debut in Spring 2015.

The traveling tour of For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights, curated by Maurice Berger, CADVC, has been extended by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), due to it’s popularity and success as an “NEH on the Road” exhibition. 

With six venues for the larger version of the exhibition and additional venues for “NEH on the Road,” the exhibition tour will exceed 40 venues in well over 25 states. Symmes Gardner, executive director of the CADVC says, “With nearly 800,000 visitors for the big show, we now anticipate at least 1 million visitors by the time the smaller exhibition closes in 2019.”

For All the World to See was presented at UMBC in 2012.

Garden of Earthly Delights, an animation by Kelley Bell, visual arts, will be presented in the 2014 Northern Spark Arts Festival in Minneapolis. The piece, which uses characters from the Hieronymus Bosch triptych of the same name, will be projected onto architecture of Minneapolis. In the animation, “the characters from Bosch’s famous painting depicting creation, an earthly paradise, and hell are revealed by a meandering spotlight that captures these creatures in midflight, slowly tracking them across the landscape—and then they vanish. They are ephemeral, like the sudden revelation of an unnoticed detail in a cityscape that comes to define the city.”

Northern Spark is a one night arts festival presented by Northern Lights.mn, a nonprofit arts organization with the mission to transform our sense of what’s possible in public space. Northern Spark will take place June 14, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Zhibo Zhang, an Assistant Professor in the Physics Department, and his collaborators received a three-year grant of $710K from NASA’s Sciences of Terra and Aqua program to study the Marine Boundary Layer (MBL) clouds.

The MBL clouds cover about 20% of Earth’s surface. They play a pivotal in Earth’s radiative energy budget. Prof. Zhang’s research will help us understand the horizontal and microphysical structure of MBL clouds and provides guidance for the development of future NASA satellite missions.

As PI, Zhang will lead a group of researchers from UMBC, NASA GISS, and the Univ. of Illinois.

Zhang was also recently selected to receive the NASA New (Early Career) Investigator Program (NIP) awards in Earth Science. The NIP is a highly competitive and prestigious award established by NASA in 1996 to encourage integrated environments for research and education for scientists and engineers at the early stage of their professional careers. This year more than 130 scientists nationwide applied for this program and only 21 were selected.

The NIP will fund Zhang and his graduate student for three years to investigate the climatic effects of above-cloud aerosols (e.g. soot and dust) using data from NASA satellites. When elevated above clouds, aerosols can generate strong warming effect on the climate due to enhanced absorption. Dr. Zhang’s research is aimed to understand the size of this effect and its potential implications to global warming.