If interested in any of the below positions, contact Katie Bishop, Technical Recruiter, Lufburrow & Company Inc., at katie@lufburrow.com.

Lead Developer

Skills- The Lead Developer should possess the knowledge of using Cloud Environments for data storage.  They must have higher programming experience with Ruby, Python, JAVA and Javascript as well as higher scripting experience with PHP.  A strong understanding of UNIX and Linux operating systems as well as a familiarity with MongoDB, Memcached, and Redis is required. They should posses a degree in Computer Science or the equivalent along with strong analytical and trouble shooting skills.

Responsibilities- The Lead Developer is expected to manage a technical team giving advice and direction to their juniors as necessary.  They are responsible for project management, full cycle development and continuous improvement initiatives.

GUI/HFE

Skills- The Graphic User Interface Designer must possess a strong knowledge of GUI and HFE, and good verbal and written communication skills.  They should have an excellent understanding of Android and IOS systems, HTML5 and JAVA programming languages, Dojo toolkit and JSON as well as Rest Services.

Responsibilities- The Graphic User Interface Designer is expected to coordinate visual design projects and perform testing of designs.  They are responsible for participating in the full lifecycle of product development and working closely with product management.

Functional Lead

Skills- The Functional Lead must possess a working knowledge of graph databases and key values stores, strong Linux and UNIX administration skills, delivering software, and networking capabilities.  They must have experience in programming using JAVA, HTTP protocol, Python, Javascript, Dojo toolkit and OAUTH2.

Responsibilities- The Functional Lead are expected to manage the functional team giving advice and direction to their juniors as needed.  They will test and certify integrity of automated solutions and programs, and explain how to branch, for and tag code.  They will also develop, verify and write business and functional requirements, configurations, work flow analyses, test plans and test scripts.

Platform Lead

Skills- The Platform Lead must possess strong knowledge of Application and Instrumentation Monitoring (BIT), and Authentication, Authorization and Audit (AAA).  They must have strong Linux administration skills and be able to program using JAVA, HTTP protocol, Python, Javascript and OAUTH2.  They also must have a working knowledge of graph databases and key value stores (NOSQL).

Responsibilities- The Platform Lead is expected to lead the platform team and give advice and direction to their juniors as needed.  They will be required to understand the limitations and challenges of system integration and compatibility issues between multiple platforms.  They will provide input and suggestions based on knowledge of area and responsibility and be able to explain hot to branch, fork and tag code.

Platform Developer

Skills- The Platform Developer must possess strong knowledge of Application and Instrumentation Monitoring (BIT), and Authentication, Authorization and Audit (AAA).  They must have strong Linux administration skills and be able to program using JAVA, HTTP protocol, Python, Javascript and OAUTH2.  They also must have a working knowledge of graph databases and key value stores (NOSQL).

Responsibilities- The Platform Developer is expected to demonstrate experience delivering software.  They will provide input and suggestions based on knowledge of area and responsibility and be able to explain hot to branch, fork and tag code.

Applications Lead

Skills- The Applications Lead must possess strong Linux administration skills, experience with networking and programming using JAVA, HTTP protocol, Python, Javascript, Dojo toolkit and OAUTH2.  They must have a working knowledge of graph databases and key value stores (NOSQL).

Responsibilities- The Applications Lead is expected to lead the applications team and give advice and direction to their juniors as needed.  They are responsible for delivering software, explaining how to branch, fork and tag code, and providing expert knowledge and skill for development.

Architect

Skills- The Architect must possess a working knowledge of graph databases and key value stores (NOSQL), and have experience with networking, delivering software and programming using JAVA, HTTP protocol, Python, Javascript, Dojo toolkit and OAUTH2.  They are required to have strong Linux administration skills.

Responsibilities- The Architect is expected to lead the technical teams to continuously improve the technology platform and delivery value.  They will ensure accuracy in terms and asset management, explain how to branch, fork and tag code, and provide and review estimates for software development.  They are also expected to identify opportunities to adopt innovative technologies.

Release Engineer

Skills- The Release Engineer must possess a working knowledge of graph databases and key value stores (NOSQL), and configuration management.  They will have experience with code documentation and interface control documents maintained as wikis, software engineering and release engineering if configuration management.  They have strong Linux administration and networking shills. 

Responsibilities- The Release Engineer is expected to promote and enforce standard release process, maintain and update tools used to assist with preparing release packaged and debug deployment issues.  They will support and document the evaluation of new proposed technologies by insuring operational requirements are met as well as solve release engineering problems.  They must also be able to explain how to branch, fork and tag code.

If you reserving space for weekly events/meetings, you can only reserve 1 space a week at this time. After the first 2 weeks of the spring semester, please email us for additional weekly reservations.
• If you are reserving space for a reoccurring event, please place these reservations in 1 single request. If you are confused and want to make sure you are requesting properly, explain what you want in the "comments" section.
Some of the Residential Life spaces are now reserve-able through our office. Academic spaces and residential spaces are not reserve-able until approximately 2 weeks into the spring semester. The only exception is if you are reserving space during the following times:  Fridays after 5pm up until Sundays at 11pm and during Free Hour. Please feel free to place your reservations now and you will be approved once this space has been released by the Registrar and Residential Life respectively.
The Fine Arts Building is going off-line for renovations beginning Summer 2014 and will become available again in the Fall of 2015 for reservations.

Please make sure you are communicating within your organization to avoid duplicate requests being submitted.
If you would like make changes to a request that has been already submitted, please do not submit another request. All you will need to do is send an email to schedule@umbc.edu with your reservation number which is the 2014-AA*** Number. (The first four digits will always be the year the request was submitted)

***If you are planning a large-scale event (approx. 70 people or more), you must reserve your space through R25 and then schedule an Event Planning Meeting with Jackie 1-2 months before your event (depending on how big the event, the resources needed, etc). If you are requesting funds from the SGA Finance 
Board, you must meet with Jackie to discuss all the details and pricing BEFORE completing the required documents and submitting them in time to meet the SGA Finance Board deadlines.

**Since some of your groups will do Officer Transitions this semester. Please get your newer members involved and teach them about the event planning process in order to continue the momentum of your student organization. You shouldn't leave the future leadership of your organization without the resources for successful spaces reservations and event planning. 

·Book.Plan.Enjoy…Book your event at www.umbc.edu/r25 . Plan out the details of your event with your organization and meet with me, Jackie Aliotta (optional for small events but required for large events). Enjoy your event and make UMBC Yours.

As always, we look forward to helping you plan your events! If you have any questions at all, please stop by the office or reach out to us via email/phone. We're here to help you make the event planning process as smooth as possible. 

Sincerely,

Jackie Aliotta, Drema Wentz, William Archer, and Marlie Somers

by Tanvi Gadhia and Caroline Bodnar

The habitat in central Maryland where Jill Sisson Quinn ’97, English grew up isn’t very different from the habitat in central Wisconsin where she lives now. The birds, insects, and trees are similar; you can use the same field guides, she says. Yet when she moved to the Midwest in 2005, she had traded a place full of rivers for one full of lakes, and “it was a huge problem for me,” she says. “I would wake up in the middle of the night and I would feel like I was moving to another planet.”

Is this homesickness, or an acute sensitivity to one’s environment? Quinn’s work suggests that the two things tangle like roots from different plants, complicating where personal experience starts and human nature begins. The essays in her 2010 collection, Deranged: Finding a Sense of Place in the Landscape and in the Lifespan, are remarkable literary hybrids designed to explore these complications. In one piece, she weaves a discussion of Lucy, the 3.2-million-year-old skeleton of a human ancestor, alongside a remembrance of Fatso, a tree near her childhood home. In another, a breakup is a launchpad for thinking about shrinking forests, and how life at their edges is different than their interiors.

The shifting definition of place is a constant in Deranged, and she refers often to her childhood home – more precisely, the branches of the Patapsco River not far from it. As she writes in the book’s introduction, “I like to believe that there is some un-faulty guide steering me home, and hope that if I am not there now, I soon will be.”

Quinn has been publishing these lyric essays since 2001, but their sensibility is predated by the interest in science and literature she cultivated as a student. When she arrived at UMBC, she was committed to writing poetry, inspired in part by what she had learned about astronomy.

“I remember reading the textbook religiously,” she says. “I remember it talking about stars and the birth and death of stars, and how stars aren’t really alive but that we owe our existence to stars, because the atoms that make up our bodies were formed in the centers of stars. I never read a textbook that personified things and gave this eminence to them. That really moved me.”

She wrote her honors thesis on the work of Heather McHugh, a poet who draws heavily on nature. “She’s always been an environmental writer,” says James C. McKusick, her thesis advisor, who is now dean of the Davidson Honors College at the University of Montana. “Both in her prose and her poetry, she reflects deeply on people’s relationships with place, or with humankind’s relationship with the natural world. She reflects on that in a way that a poet should, with a lot of concrete imagery – a lot of deeply thought and felt images.”

Quinn’s writing process involves a lot of walking – 6.7 miles every day with her dog, to be exact – and a lot of thinking about connections: “I discover something in nature that’s weird, like a wasp, or these beautiful rocks, and I’ve got this question in my head. I know I’m going to connect them, and then I research the nature, and the connection grows out of that.”

Last year Quinn received a $30,000 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, given annually to emerging women writers. The prize has allowed her to take a half-time sabbatical from her job as a high-school English teacher. She’s currently at work on her second book, titled The Doctrine of Signatures, which leverages her close study of nature to address larger spiritual questions. This is perhaps an unlikely pursuit for a nature writer, who’s generally expected to be a John McPhee-like rover. But in Quinn’s particular line of work, depth trumps breadth.

“I’m not a traveler,” she says. “I don’t think I’ll ever exhaust Wisconsin or Maryland.”

– Mark Athitakis

Read the full issue of the Winter 2014 UMBC Magazine.

Ebony Tongo, Chemical Engineering Major

President of UMBC's Society of Women Engineers

CSEE Professor Marie desJardins has been named as UMBC’s Presidential Teaching Professor for 2014-17. Dr. desJardins joined the UMBC faculty in 2001 after earning her Ph.D. in computer science from UC Berkeley and spending ten years at SRI International as a research scientist. She has made significant contributions to the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning, published over 100 peer-reviewed papers, brought over six million dollars to UMBC as PI or co-PI in external grant funding, and held leadership positions in the top professional organizations in her field.

Dr. desJardins is an outstanding teacher, earning praise from students in courses from freshman-level courses for non-majors to specialized graduate-level seminars. She was named one of UMBC’s “Professors Not to Miss” in 2011 and is one of the first cohort of Hrabowski Academic Innovation Fellows. She is also well known for mentoring students at all levels, having graduated ten Ph.D. and 22 M.S. students, mentored over 50 undergraduates in research and served on the dissertation and thesis committees of more than 30 other students. She was recently recognized for mentoring by the National Center for Women & Information Technology, who selected her as one of four awardees of the 2014 NCWIT Undergraduate Research Mentoring Award.

Within the department and university, Dr. desJardins’s commitment to teaching and student success goes far beyond the classroom. She has served as the computer science undergraduate program director and led an effort to redesign the introductory computing course to better serve new students. In addition to mentoring her own graduate students, she is the Faculty Advisor for the Women in Science and Engineering Graduate Association and a member of the Center for Women in Technology Advisory Board. She is regularly invited to participate on panels, give presentations in the Honors Forum and other campus events, and to run workshops for graduate students and junior faculty.

Outside of UMBC, Dr. desJardins has built an international reputation as an advocate for high-quality education, mentoring, and diversity at all levels of the profession. She has been chair, mentor, reviewer, and/or panelist of the AAAI/SIGART Doctoral Consortium for the last 14 years; this event has provided valuable feedback and mentoring to hundreds of computing graduate students during that time. She co-founded the AAAI Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence annual symposium. She regularly publishes articles on her research and innovations in computing education, including tools and techniques for classroom teaching, new courses, and analyses of the state of computer science education at the high school level.

Dr. desJardins is also a nationally recognized leader in computer science education and has received multiple NSF awards to support her work in this area. She gives frequent presentations around the state and the country on high school computer science education and preparing a diverse population of students to succeed in computing careers. She is a founding member of the Maryland chapter of the Computer Science Teachers Association, and has organized several professional development workshops for high school teachers. Her NSF-funded CE21-Maryland (Computing Education for the 21st Century) grant explored the landscape of high school CS education in Maryland, culminating in a statewide summit for educators, administrators, and community members that was held at UMBC in May 2013. A recent NSF CE-21 grant will result in curriculum creation and professional development for 100 Maryland high school teachers, focused on the new CS Principles course that is scheduled to become a new AP offering in 2016. Other funded grants in the educational arena include her Hrabowski Innovation Fund award to create the ACTIVE Center, an NSF TUES award that is developing a new freshman-level computing course, an NSF T-SITE grant to build a community of transfer scholars in IT/engineering, as well as multiple smaller awards to run workshops and support graduate student development.

We congratulate Professor desJardins for her selection as Presidential Teaching Professor and look forward to the Presidential Faculty and Staff Awards ceremony on Wednesday, April 2 in the University Center Ballroom. Not only is she an outstanding and dedicated classroom teacher, her contributions to research, teaching, mentoring, and educational innovations have been broad and sustained.

Faculty members at Maryland universities conduct important research that may provide relief for spinal cord injury victims, or develop new targeted methods to deliver drugs through nanotechnology.

More and more of that vital work is being conducted in collaborations between faculty at UMBC and the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB).

The latest venture to expand the research partnership between the two neighboring universities (separated by less than seven miles) is a joint UMBC-UMB Research and Innovation Partnership Seed Grant Program that pairs primary investigators from each university to conduct research as a team. Successful partners are offered research funding of up to $75,000 over twelve months to pursue their collaboration.

The program’s first grant recipients were announced at a ceremony and poster session held at UMBC’s Albin O. Kuhn Library on February 11, 2014. Those selected for the awards included faculty in UMBC’s College of Natural and Mathematical Science and College of Engineering and Information Technology, as well as researchers in the University of Maryland School of Medicine and University of Maryland School of Pharmacy.

At the announcement ceremony, UMB Chief Academic and Research Officer and Senior Vice President Bruce Jarrell observed that the Seed Grant Program represents the deepening of a relationship that already includes cooperation on a joint graduate school and the Institute of Marine Environmental Technology (IMET) as well as a panoply of curricular efforts in areas such as the life sciences, gerontology, health informatics and social work.

“These collaborations already exist,” Jarrell observed. “And we’re proud to have UMBC as a partner.”

UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, is enthusiastic about the projects selected for the initial round, which include investigations that may influence the course of research into cancer, strokes and muscle degeneration.

“The Seed Grant Program is a means by which both universities can better discover each other’s strengths and needs to see how we can better collaborate,” says Hrabowski.

Jay Perman, President of the University of Maryland, Baltimore, says increased partnership between the two universities is a key element of his vision. “I cannot stress enough the importance we place on our collaborative relationship with our colleagues at UMBC. The partnerships that UMBC and UMB have enjoyed for years are real, longstanding collaborations, and have been extremely successful, if not widely known.”

At the state level, the research partnerships fostered by the Seed Grant Program will further extend Maryland’s research profile and aid in securing vital funding from federal agencies, private foundations and other funding sources.

William E. Kirwan, Chancellor of the University System of Maryland (USM), praises the new program for its “focus on cutting-edge science and health concerns” and its emphasis on interdisciplinary teamwork.

“It is this type of structured collaboration.” Kirwan says, “that will enable both UMBC and UMB—as well as the USM—to reach their full potential, and to take full advantage of the opportunities before us.”

The first five teams to receive UMBC-UMB Research and Innovation Partnership Seed Grants are:

* Kathleen Hoffman, professor of mathematics (UMBC) and Asaf Keller, professor of anatomy and neurobiology (UMB), are exploring the chronic pain of patients with spinal cord injury and how computational modeling may help analyze the neurobiological changes in the central nervous system after such injuries.

* Martin Schneider, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology (UMB) and Bradford E. Peercy, assistant professor of mathematics (UMBC) are combining forces to analyze a transcription factor (Foxo1) in skeletal muscle that activates genes in a pathway that leads to the breakdown of muscle protein. They hope to develop protocols and models that will provide new approaches to controlling this factor.

* Charles Bieberich, professor of biological sciences (UMBC) and Paul Shapiro, associate professor of pharmaceutical sciences (UMB) are working on a more targeted use of a promising cancer treatment called “kinase inhibition.” Currently kinase inhibition creates resistance over time, so Bieberich and Shapiro are looking for more selective paths to inhibit portions of an enzyme that allows cancer cells to multiply without shutting down other functions in the process.

* Marie-Christine Daniel, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry (UMBC) and Peter Swaan, professor of pharmaceutical sciences (UMB) are exploring how nanotechnology might improve the delivery of drugs (increased dosage, or better targeting) by examining a class of molecules known as “dendrons.” 

* Tulay Adali, professor of computer science and electrical engineering (UMBC) and Kelly Westlake, assistant professor of physical therapy and rehabilitation science (UMB) are exploring how using a powerful computational tool (independent vector analysis) can aid in navigating variability in cognitive neural function and better help the recovery of stroke victims.

A call for proposals for the next round of the UMBC-UMB Research and Innovation Partnership Seed Grant Program will be issued on April 15, 2014.

(02/12/14)