Katherine Carver ’26, physics and mathematics, started off her UMBC experience with a big bang—participating in the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory CIRCUIT internship as a first-year student in spring 2023. Carver says she took advantage of every opportunity she could, from on-site guest lectures and panel discussions to informally networking with APL employees down the hall.

One of the panelists particularly caught her attention, so Carver approached her afterward—and in the two-hour conversation that followed, Kathleen Hamilton-Campos, an APL researcher, encouraged Carver to apply to the Space Astronomy Summer Program at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) at Johns Hopkins University, which Hamilton-Campos had completed in 2019. Carver received notification that she’d been selected as an intern while attending a Society of Women Engineers conference this spring.

This summer at STScI, Carver, a Meyerhoff Scholar, has been digging into developing open-source software that allows astronomers anywhere to analyze data arriving from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the most powerful space telescope ever launched. 

Mission possible with James Webb

“The whole mission objective for JWST was to see further back into the universe than ever before or possible with the Hubble Telescope or any other type of telescope,” Carver explains. “With how light travels, if you’re looking at something four billion light years away,”—which JWST can—“that means you’re looking at it as it appeared four billion years ago. Which could be very useful for scientists trying to understand how our universe has come to evolve to its current state.” Indeed, Carver continues, JWST can observe light so old that it comes from nearly the beginning of the universe, more than 13 billion years ago—billions of years before Earth even existed. 

The analysis software Carver is working on is called Jdaviz, and it’s written in python. The data files are massive and complex, Carver explains, “so for a scientist who’s interested in only a brief part of the sky, or a particular source, like a star or a galaxy, it can be hard to navigate,” she says, “especially when some of these images have thousands and thousands of sources in them.”

Carver’s contributions are making the data easier to work with, and as a result facilitating scientific discovery in a wide range of research areas. As part of the internship, she also went on a field trip to NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and saw where the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope—a telescope whose capabilities will complement JWST’s observations—is being developed. 

“Be persistent”

Through her CIRCUIT and STScI internships, Carver, a rising junior, has already picked up valuable coding skills, including managing interactions between behind-the-scenes code and the user interface, debugging code with errors, navigating code sets that include hundreds of files that all need to talk to each other, and much more. 

The computer science training is likely to come in handy in her future, she says, but she doesn’t expect coding to become her bread and butter. She wants to stay on the science side, using tools like Jdaviz rather than developing them—although her time coding will make her even more grateful for the programmers who do. This fall, Carver is excited to move in that direction by conducting research with UMBC astrophysicist Adi Foord. 

Carver has some words of encouragement for students just getting started on their research journey. 

“There’s no hurt in putting your name out there, even if you feel like you will get rejected. Sometimes you might see the final polished picture, like, ‘Oh, she’s done research at APL. She’s done research at STScI. Those are really competitive’—but I also got a lot of rejections,” Carver says. “Shoot for the internships even if you feel like you won’t get them. Be persistent, ask around, talk to your professors. And then once you are there, take maximum advantage of every opportunity.”

The UMBC Ancient Studies Department will conduct its annual study tour in Turkey, March 14-23, 2025. The cost of $3,500 covers all air and land travel, twin-share accommodation for eight nights at four-star hotels, eight buffet breakfasts, two dinners, two lunches, and entrance to all archaeological sites and museums on the itinerary. A single room is available at an additional cost of $482. ANCS majors and minors, UMBC students, faculty, staff, alumni, and their friends and family are invited to join us. 

You can download a registration form from the department website (https://ancientstudies.umbc.edu). Please return this fillable form to Lydia DeRidder (lderidde@umbc.edu) by Oct.4, 2024. An initial deposit of $150 is due Oct. 4, 2024. Ancient Studies majors and minors can also download applications for travel subsidies from the department website. Please return completed subsidy forms to Dr. David Rosenbloom (dsrose@umbc.edu) by Sept. 27, 2024.

The tour begins with a two-night stay in Istanbul, followed one-night in Çanakkale (Troy), three nights in Kuşadasi, and two nights in Ankara, before returning to Istanbul for the flight home. In Istanbul, we will visit the Hippodrome of Constantine, Aghia Sophia, the Archaeological Museum, Topkapı Palace, and the Blue Mosque. Next, we travel to the archaeological site and museum of Troy en route to Kuşadası, the base of operations for trips to Ephesos, Priene, Miletos, and Didyma. We spend the last two days and nights in Ankara, visiting the magnificent Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, and three Hittite sites, the fortified capital Hattusa, the necropolis at Alaca Höyük, and the mysterious sanctuary and rock reliefs at Yazılıkaya.

Starting August 1, 2024, Google will implement changes that impact ad blocking tools in Chrome and how YouTube videos are viewed. Chrome no longer supports tools that block ads, including third-party extensions, and has developed technology to inject ads into the videos themselves to bypass ad-blocking tools. 

For several years, UMBC's Division of Information Technology has received reports of gift card scams. Recently, some of these scams have been sent as text messages to personal phones, falsely representing themselves as directions from senior administration officials. Regardless of how the message is sent or received, who appears to be sending it, or what personal information it may contain, it's a scam. Nobody is going to ask you to buy several hundred dollars' worth of gift cards and send the PINs.

The scam is simple, and while details may vary, the basic outline remains the same.

Short version:
Someone tells you to buy one or more gift cards and then to send them the numbers off the back.

Detailed version:
The victim receives a message, possibly through email, SMS text message, or even a phone call, telling them that someone in authority (a supervisor, the Internal Revenue Service, etc.) needs them to purchase some quantity of gift cards. The message will specify a type of gift card, such as Google Play or iTunes, but it could be any card that can be used like money. The message will often be worded to make the immediate purchase seem urgent and may state that the person needing the card cannot be reached directly (e.g., "in a meeting" or "out of the country").

The victim is instructed to get the PIN off the back of the card and send it or a picture of it via phone, email, or some other method of electronic communication.

Once this is done, the scam is over. The scammer can sell the PIN numbers at a discount. Since the scammer has spent nothing, everything is pure profit.

If you receive a scam message involving UMBC phone numbers, UMBC-owned phones, or mentioning members of the UMBC community, please notify DoIT through email at security@umbc.edu.

You can find more information about these scams at:

• https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/avoiding-and-reporting-gift-card-scams
• https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2023/07/if-you-paid-scammer-gift-card-your-money-gone-maybe-not
• https://support.apple.com/gift-card-scams