Kaitlyn Sadtler ’11, biological sciences, has been selected for the TIME100 Next list. In its fifth year, the list aims “to recognize rising leaders in health, climate, business, sports, and more—and by doing so, not just show the stories that are capturing headlines in 2024, but also introduce you to the people who we believe will play an important role in leading the future.” 

Since 2019, Sadtler has been a tenure-track researcher and chief of the Section on Immunoengineering at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. Her interdisciplinary research straddles bioengineering and immunology.

“I’m super excited and absolutely surprised to be included on the TIME100 Next list. Working in regenerative medicine, our lab gets to look forward to where we could build therapies to help regrow our damaged tissues after traumatic injuries,” Sadlter shared. “I’m also thrilled that there is excitement for bioengineering at the National Institutes of Health. Biomedical engineering is a field that’s able to connect the basic fundamental biology discoveries with clinical translation and application of those discoveries.”

In 2020, Sadtler led a study published in Science Translational Medicinelooking for undiagnosed COVID-19 cases in more than 9,000 blood samples that never-diagnosed participants mailed in. The study found that during the first several months of the pandemic, for every diagnosed case of COVID-19, an estimated 4.8 cases went undiagnosed. That suggested a total of 16.8 million undiagnosed (and therefore mild or asymptomatic) cases by July 2020.

Undiagnosed cases were more likely in certain demographic groups, including younger people, people in urban areas, and people without risk factors for severe disease. The findings provided important insights for the pandemic response by suggesting that immunity acquired from infection among the young and healthy population and in dense areas was higher than previously understood, meaning herd immunity might be reached faster than first anticipated. 

After graduating summa cum laude from UMBC, Sadtler completed her doctorate at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT. Sadlter has received numerous awards, and her 2018 TED Talk was one of the 25 most-viewed TED talks that year. Sadtler also presented at UMBC’s GRIT-X speaker series in 2022. 

The UMBC Cybersecurity Institute and the Division of Research and Creative Achievement, in partnership with the College of Engineering and Information Technology, recently announced the recipients of the 2024 Cybersecurity Leadership Exploratory grant program.

The internal funding opportunity is designed to promote innovative, interdisciplinary research and education focused on enhancing UMBC’s leadership in cybersecurity research. Awardees received up to $45,000 in funding to develop their exploratory projects—an increase compared to its inaugural recipient cohort in 2023. 

The 2024 recipients are:

• Alan Sherman and Enis Golaszewski for “Modeling and Formal-Methods Analysis of the Secure DNA Protocol”
• Manas Gaur for “Cybersecurity Research: MetamorphicLLM: Robust Understanding of Metamorphic Malware Through Attacks and Defenses Using Neurosymbolic Large Language Models”
• Meilin Yu and Zhiyuan Chen for “Detecting Stealthy Long-Term Cyber Attacks on Wind Energy Assets with Physics-Informed Neural Network Technologies”
• Naghmeh Karim for “Artificial Intelligence and Hardware Security: From Research to Classroom (Educational Proposal)”
• Nilanjan Banerjee and Mohamed Younis for “Implementing Endpoint Security for Cyber-Physical Systems”
• Tera Reynolds for “Swiss Cheese Please: Analyzing Cybersecurity Risks in the Digital Health Ecosystem with Patients with Complex Care Needs”

Learn more about UMBC’s internal funding opportunities.