The UMBC career of Rileigh Mansfield ’26, mathematics, has been a masterclass in combining high-level theory with real-world impact. A Meyerhoff Scholar who began conducting research in her first year, Mansfield has spent the last three years applying complex data assimilation to everything from epidemiology to volcanology. Her academic path has taken her from the Andes of Ecuador to a math camp in Rwanda, and now it will take her to Stanford University to pursue a Ph.D. in geophysics. But Mansfield’s time at UMBC has included much more than academics: It has been defined by resilience and a contagious enthusiasm for building community—whether through tutoring and mentoring fellow students or playing Settlers of Catan with classmates and friends. 

Q: What’s next for you after graduation?

A: I’m heading to Stanford University to pursue a Ph.D. in geophysics. Stanford has always been my dream school. I was nervous about applying, because I was switching from math to geophysics and graduating a year early. Plus, I didn’t do as well as I’d hoped on the GRE, and I felt like it was going to be impossible to get in. But I went for it anyway, with encouragement from my best friend—and now I get to go!

Q: How have you gotten involved on campus, and how have those activities supported your growth?

A: I’ve served as the president of Pi Mu Epsilon (the national math honors society), a Meyerhoff Peer Advisor, and a teaching assistant in the math department. I also conducted research with math professors Dr. Animikh Biswas and Dr. Kathleen Hoffman. But honestly, some of my most meaningful involvement has been more informal. Last spring, I was having a tough semester when I got invited to join a group from the math lounge to play the board game Catan on Tuesdays. It became a little community and something to look forward to every week—a much-needed step back from school and work. I actually play in competitive Catan tournaments now, and I’m even hosting an official tournament this spring through the math honors society.

Q: How did you first get involved in research at UMBC, and what did you focus on?

A: I got involved in research through the Meyerhoff Scholars Program. Dr. Biswas taught one of my Summer Bridge classes. I asked a lot of questions, and he said I should apply to be in his lab. In the fall, a notification went out for a research position in the math department, so I filled it out, and it ended up being for his lab combined with Dr. Hoffman’s. I got to start my first year, which was really cool. My research focused on data assimilation—specifically looking at parameter sensitivity and estimation for biological models. I was studying how diseases like cholera and HIV spread. Jumping into that as a freshman was tricky, but I had a lot of support from the seniors in the lab.

Q: So how did you end up pivoting to geophysics for graduate school?

A: My dad was a budget analyst for NASA, so I grew up around space and earth science. I’ve always been mystified by natural disasters like earthquakes and volcanoes, because we don’t really have them in Maryland. When Dr. Biswas introduced me to data assimilation, he mentioned it’s used for weather forecasting. That was the spark. I liked my research at UMBC, because it’s easy to see how working in biology can help save people’s lives, but honestly biology isn’t my passion. When I looked internally at what I’m excited about that can also help people, natural disasters came to mind. I realized I could use my math background to work on earthquake or volcano early-warning systems. 

Q: Who has supported you throughout your UMBC journey?

A: I met my friend Emilia Pelegano-Titmuss at a summer program at Caltech in 2024, and we have supported each other in our pursuit of earth science ever since. Last spring, I had an incredibly challenging semester. My grades dipped, and I lost my self-confidence; I felt like I wasn’t made for research. Emilia talked me through it. She told me, “If you and I aren’t made for the research life, I don’t know who is.” She pushed me to graduate early and apply to grad school with her. Without her courage and motivation, I wouldn’t be in the position I am today.

Q: Can you describe key takeaways from your education abroad experiences?

A: Going to Ecuador was my favorite part of undergrad. In winter 2025, I went into the Andes to do field work in volcanology with Emilia, who goes to Hunter College. We stayed with indigenous communities who lived right on a volcano. It was a huge cultural experience in addition to the science we did. I even got to shear alpacas! Sitting down for dinner with the people I want my work to impact was a huge motivator. I learned about how there was a lot of distrust between their community and scientists, including the ones who order evacuations around disasters. I want to help bridge those divides.

I also went to Rwanda to teach elective math seminars at a Supporting African Maths Initiative (SAMI) camp. I taught game theory and disease modeling, but I also spent a lot of time helping students understand the U.S. college admissions process. Many of those students are so bright, and they really want to come to the U.S. for college, but they don’t have the resources or information to navigate the system. I still talk to some of them today to help them through the Common App.

Q: Why is it important to you to make a positive impact and help others?

A: I don’t like to feel like I’m wasting my time—if I’m going to spend my life doing research, I want to know it’s having a real-world impact. I’m also just genuinely excited about what I do. I really love it, and I want everyone else to love it, too. My favorite type of mentor is someone who loves something so much that even if at first you don’t understand what they’re talking about, you start caring about it just because they do—their enthusiasm is contagious. I try to bring that same energy to my work as a teaching assistant and peer mentor and to sharing math and science with anyone and everyone.

Q: What’s something unique about you that isn’t obvious from your résumé?

A: I am obsessed with the show Survivor. I audition for it every year. I’ve been watching it since third grade, and I’m always training for it. One year during finals, I even practiced eating only small portions of rice and working out on very little sleep just to see if my brain could still function—and it turned out it could. I also practiced starting fires with a flint. 

I also did competitive trampolining for years, and I play in competitive Catan tournaments. It’s interesting because, like Survivor, it’s a social game and a strategic game. My strength is always the social game. More recently, I went on The Price is Right with my friend Emilia. If you watch the June 1 episode, you’ll see us screaming and jumping up and down in the audience; she got picked to participate!

Q: What advice do you have for incoming UMBC students or aspiring undergraduate researchers?

A: Go to office hours. Even if you don’t have a specific question, just go and talk to your professors. It helps the professors know who you are, which can have the side benefit of motivating you even more to do well in the class. It can also create opportunities, like how I talked to Dr. Biswas at Summer Bridge, which led to doing research in his lab.

And if you really want something, you can always find a way to get it. Don’t just say, “UMBC doesn’t offer it,” or, “It’s not easy to get.” Many of the things I did weren’t here at UMBC, but UMBC professors sent me applications for workshops and opportunities. Dr. Justin Webster and Dr. Biswas sent me to a workshop in Texas on partial differential equations and to Colorado for a conference on data simulation—both were incredibly valuable. The resources are there to help you get what you want, but you have to go after it.

Credit and thank you to Sarah Swatski from the Faculty Development Center for this idea, and to Billy Schneider for building it out for us!

Are you trying to wade through the murky depths of your Site’s Media files and finding yourself lost, dazed, and confused? A new tool is here to help!

The Media Inventory

This button is now available in your Media Library, which you can find on the left-hand navigation if you are logged into Sites.

This Media Inventory will download a CSV that contains the following information* for every piece of media in the library:

• File name

• File type

• Uploaded on date

• Uploaded by person

• Uploaded to URL (please note this is the original URL the media was uploaded to, it does not update if the media is moved to a different page or removed from that page!)

• File title

• Alt text

• Caption

• Description

*If the information is available for the file, if not, it will just show up as blank for that section.

What can you do with this? Our starter suggestions:

1. Sort by “alt text” for a quick way to see what files are missing alt text, or to review the current alt text for accuracy

2. Sort by “file type” to understand how many PDFs are present on your Site

3. Sort by “uploaded on date” to review your oldest media and find your most likely candidates for deletion

As part of UMBC’s ongoing commitment to fostering equitable and inclusive working environments, we are pleased to share training opportunities designed to help employees and supervisors develop the knowledge and skills needed to engage effectively with diversity, manage workplace challenges, and create environments where all members of the community can thrive. These offerings include virtual courses available through Vector Solutions; any UMBC employee can use their university credentials to login and search for courses.

Faculty, staff, supervisors, and partners are encouraged to participate. For questions or enrollment support, please submit a request form here or email culture@umbc.edu.

Virtual Trainings Options

Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging for Leaders

Designed to meet employees and organizations where they are in their learning journey, this course helps leaders develop the skills needed to collaborate effectively in an increasingly diverse workforce. Participants explore key topics such as identity, equity, unconscious bias, microaggressions, and allyship to strengthen inclusive leadership practices.

Participants will:

• Build awareness of key concepts related to diversity, equity, and belonging.

• Strengthen leadership practices that support inclusive collaboration.

• Identify ways to promote a speak-up culture and allyship within teams.

Communication for Inclusion

This course emphasizes the importance of focusing on impact rather than intent when using identity terminology and engaging with self-identification. It explores how small acts that undermine can affect workplace relationships and offers strategies for addressing them constructively.

Participants will:

• Understand how everyday interactions can impact workplace inclusion.

• Learn strategies for responding to actions that may undermine others.

• Explore how microaffirmations can help create more supportive environments.

Engagement with Diversity (Employees and Managers)

This course focuses on how employees define and engage with diversity, using the iceberg model to illustrate how some aspects of diversity are not readily observable. It examines how diversity resistance, reactions to difference, assumptions, and the ladder of inference can negatively impact the workplace, while providing practical strategies to help participants engage more thoughtfully with diversity.

Participants will:

• Understand visible and invisible dimensions of diversity using the iceberg model.

• Examine how assumptions and reactions to differences can affect workplace interactions.

• Develop strategies for engaging constructively with diverse perspectives.

Discrimination: Avoiding Discriminatory Practices

This course provides supervisors with an overview of best practices for establishing and maintaining a respectful and positive workplace environment. Participants examine how to recognize discriminatory behaviors and foster a culture that values respect, acceptance, and fairness.

Participants will:

• Identify behaviors and practices that may contribute to workplace discrimination.
• Learn strategies for supporting respectful interactions across differences.
• Explore approaches for fostering a culture of acceptance and respect.

 Managing Difficult Behaviors

This course provides supervisory staff members with practical approaches for managing difficult behaviors in the workplace. Participants explore strategies for maintaining professionalism, addressing concerns constructively, and focusing on solutions that support healthy team dynamics.

Participants will:

• Reflect on personal responses and approaches when addressing difficult behavior.

• Learn strategies for maintaining self-control and focusing on problem-solving.

• Develop techniques for coaching employees and addressing behavior through performance management.

Finding & Enrolling in Courses: Browse available courses by selecting the “Courses” tab in the left-hand toolbar. In the library, “select” a specific category or “all” to view titles and summaries. Need help enrolling? Visit Vector’s self-enrollment support page for step-by-step guidance.

Hey everyone,

We have a limited amount of breakfast available in Commons 308. Because quantities are small, we expect everything to be gone in about 20 minutes. If you're nearby, come grab a plate before it runs out!

On the Menu:

• Scrambled Eggs

• Potatoes

• Turkey Bacon

• Fruit

• Coffee & Juice

Temporary Private room available in a 2BHK townhouse for a male at Westland Gardens for a 3-month move-in.

Perfect for interns, students living on campus whose apartments will be closed, or anyone looking for temporary housing.

Fully furnished 2BHK townhouse: 

What you get:

• Spacious living room with sofa + TV.
• Fully equipped kitchen (Oven, Microwave, Fridge, Dishwasher).
• In-unit Washer & Dryer.
• Central heating & cooling.
• Just a 1-minute walk to the UMBC bus stop.
• Only 10 minutes walk to campus. 
• Availability: May 25th - Aug 15th.
• Rent is just 600$ only.

DM for more information: +1-202-937-5716 or email me at IO95979@umbc.edu

Join us on Wed, May 6 for a film screening of Dr. Zareen Taj's براي قوما | For my people: A Hazara Woman's Journey. 

We'll kick off the event with some delicious Afghan appetizers. We'll then engage in a participatory dialogue about hope & culture building rooted in UMBC's 2025-2026 Culture Builders Program and the themes of the film. We'll then screen the film and have a conversation with Dr. Taj.

About the Film

"This film brings together my life story, my academic work, and my years of activism into a single narrative that moves between memory and analysis. Beginning in a rural village in Afghanistan and shaped by war, displacement, and life as a refugee, the film traces how I came to question the expectations placed on girls and, over time, found my voice in resisting them. It also documents my return to Afghanistan to record the stories of Hazara communities living through violence and loss, and the difficult process of making sense of those experiences through both filmmaking and scholarship. At its core, the film reflects on what it means to live at the intersection of gender and ethnic oppression, while also showing how storytelling can create connection, visibility, and a sense of belonging—for myself and for the communities whose stories I carry.

The film’s title, “براي قوما | For my people,” speaks to my work advocating for my people and the message I share to Hazaras across the world: to tell their stories." - Dr. Zareen Taj '26, LLC; Adjunct Faculty, AMST & ASIA

About Culture Builders at UMBC

This event is co-organized by Priya Bhayana, Global Asias Project Manager, who is a 2025-2026 UMBC Culture Builder. Culture Builders is a cohort-based initiative launched by the Division of Institutional Equity. Culture building is the intentional practice of developing shared values, beliefs, and behaviors that shape how we live, learn, and lead together. In a time marked by polarization and a loss of shared humanity, creating an inclusive culture requires all of us. Each of us has a role to play. Read more here.

Original Post

The Simons Foundation’s Life Sciences division is now accepting applications for its latest Simons Graduate Fellowships in Ecology and Evolution request for applications (RFA). These awards provide support for students entering U.S.-based Ph.D. programs with a plan to perform research in ecology and evolution. We are particularly interested in interdisciplinary research that jointly considers processes on both ecological and evolutionary timescales, or that links studies of ecology and evolution to other STEM fields, including physics, computer science, mathematics, chemistry and other areas of biology, especially genetics.

Key Dates

• Fellowship application deadline: June 30, 2026 at 12:00 p.m. (noon) Eastern time
• LOI notification: October 30, 2026
• Acceptance deadline (finalists only): April 15, 2027
• Full proposal deadline (finalists only): May 27, 2027
• Award notifications: July 1, 2027
• Fellowship start date: August 1, September 1 or October 1, 2027

All LOIs must be submitted electronically through the Simons Award Manager (SAM).

APPLY HERE!

Hi everyone,

I'm writing to give everyone an update regarding the UMBC HPCF and other Research Computing projects currently undertaken by DoIT. 

Summary

• Critical Vulnerability Patched

• Slurm bug and misuse of GPUs

• GPU machines currently down

• Reminder of gpu-general partition

• Slow read/write files on RRStor

Critical Vulnerability Patched

In April, a critical vulnerability was announced that affects every Linux distribution since 2017. As a result, chip and other research machines had to take an emergency shutdown on April 27, 2026 to patch the affected machines, and resulted in the reboot of all login nodes and compute nodes. Jobs were killed as a result. If you have questions about how this may have affected you please submit an RT Ticket.

Slurm bug and misuse of GPUs

Earlier this month, it came to our attention that users could gain access to more than initial requested GPUs from slurm by remotely accessing nodes running active slurm allocations and manually changing environment variables, resulting in jobs that were expecting more VRAM than was available, and causing jobs to die with out-of-memory (OOM) errors. This bug has been fixed. As a reminder, users should abide by the constraints set out by slurm. Any efforts to subvert the use of slurm constraints may result in a lock being placed on your account. 

GPU machines currently down

We are aware that the following machines are currently down: g24-07, g20-03, g20-10, g20-13. Please bear with us as we attempt to make repairs to these machines. 

Reminder of gpu-general partition

Recently, we’ve received multiple tickets asking why jobs were being preempted before the three day limit. This has been in large part due to the use of the “gpu” partition, and increased interest in the 2024 GPUs. As a reminder, back in September, we rolled out the use of dedicated access partitions for GPU users. This means that jobs placed on any of these partitions may be preempted before the three day grace period if a contributor wants access to that machine. If you wish to avoid this, you may use the “gpu-general” partition, which guarantees you will only be placed on to nodes that will give you the three day minimum runtime.  

Slow Read/Write Files on RRStor

Be advised, we are aware of the ongoing issues with the RRStor filesystem and are actively working with our vendor to resolve the issues. For more information, check out this myUMBC post: “Storage System Performance Update.”

Publications
If you have any publications, presentations, theses, or other works that made use of the campus cluster, please submit an RT Ticket with bibliographic information so that we can accurately reflect this work in our records and on the HPCF Website. 

Need Help?
As always, please communicate any issues/questions to the Research Computing RT Queue (hpcf.umbc.edu > User Support > Request Help).

As always, keep computin’!

Max Breitmeyer,
HPC System Administrator

As we head into the final stretch of the semester, UMBC Dining Services has plenty of treats to keep you fueled, focused, and smiling. Check out our lineup of events for the rest of May:

🥩 May 6 (Wed) | Prime Night — True Grit’s

🥤 May 6 (Wed) | National Beverage Day Pop-up — University Center

🏡 May 7 (Thu) | Taste of Home — True Grit’s

🥞 May 12 (Tue) | Midnight Breakfast — The Commons

🧑‍🍳 May 13 (Wed) | Teaching Kitchen — True Grit’s

📚 May 13 (Wed) | Study Day Pop-up — University Center

🍦 May 19 (Tue) | Ice Cream Social — True Grit’s

Mark your calendars and come grab a bite with your friends! Good luck with your finals, Retrievers—you've got this!

Join us on Wed, May 6 for a film screening of Dr. Zareen Taj's براي قوما | For my people: A Hazara Woman's Journey. 

We'll kick off the event with some delicious Afghan appetizers. We'll then engage in a participatory dialogue about hope & culture building rooted in UMBC's 2025-2026 Culture Builders Program and the themes of the film. We'll then screen the film and have a conversation with Dr. Taj.

About the Film

"This film brings together my life story, my academic work, and my years of activism into a single narrative that moves between memory and analysis. Beginning in a rural village in Afghanistan and shaped by war, displacement, and life as a refugee, the film traces how I came to question the expectations placed on girls and, over time, found my voice in resisting them. It also documents my return to Afghanistan to record the stories of Hazara communities living through violence and loss, and the difficult process of making sense of those experiences through both filmmaking and scholarship. At its core, the film reflects on what it means to live at the intersection of gender and ethnic oppression, while also showing how storytelling can create connection, visibility, and a sense of belonging—for myself and for the communities whose stories I carry.

The film’s title, “براي قوما | For my people,” speaks to my work advocating for my people and the message I share to Hazaras across the world: to tell their stories." - Dr. Zareen Taj '26, LLC; Adjunct Faculty, AMST & ASIA

About Culture Builders at UMBC

This event is co-organized by Priya Bhayana, Global Asias Project Manager, who is a 2025-2026 UMBC Culture Builder. Culture Builders is a cohort-based initiative launched by the Division of Institutional Equity. Culture building is the intentional practice of developing shared values, beliefs, and behaviors that shape how we live, learn, and lead together. In a time marked by polarization and a loss of shared humanity, creating an inclusive culture requires all of us. Each of us has a role to play. Read more here.

Original Post