Hey everyone,

There is vacancy room need to be filled for one student in the house at Maple Ave  right now. It is very near UMBC campus walking distance about 8 minutes from campus.

Rent is $475, plus utilities share with other UMBC student and wifi, if you are interesting in , please email at lidimin@gmail.com and briefly introducing yourself( such as name ,gender , which year study).

No one wants to receive a cancer diagnosis. Ovarian cancer can be particularly scary, because its vague symptoms make it difficult to detect early—and when caught late, after the cancer has already metastasized into nearby organs, the five-year survival rate of ovarian cancer is less than 30 percent. 

However, if caught early, that number rises sharply to 90 percent, explains Achuth Padmanabhan, assistant professor of biological sciences. Padmanabhan, who received his Ph.D. from UMBC in 2011 and returned as a faculty member in 2019, has made it the mission of his long-term research program to improve these daunting statistics. 

Padmanabhan’s research group, which includes graduate, undergraduate, and high school students, is revealing new potential treatment options by expanding understanding of the basic biology of ovarian cancer. Overall, “our goal is to eliminate ovarian cancer mortality,” he says.

Starting this summer, Padmanabhan will be in an even stronger position to pursue that ambitious goal: He has received a two-year, $387,000 Ovarian Cancer Pilot Award and a four-year, $1.2 million Ovarian Cancer Academy Early-Career Award, both from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). In addition to funding, the Academy offers valuable opportunities for mentorship from leading ovarian cancer researchers, including Padmanabhan’s mentor le-Ming Shih, professor of gynecology and obstetrics at Johns Hopkins University. Workshops and training sessions with all Academy members also offer networking opportunities and exposure to the latest knowledge and techniques for fighting this life-threatening disease.

Opening doors to new treatment and diagnostic tools

Padmanabhan has already contributed to the understanding of how ovarian cancer progression is regulated, opening new avenues to developing treatments. His lab discovered that a protein called zinc finger protein 217, or ZNF217, is frequently present in unusually high amounts in ovarian cancer tumors and is associated with tumor growth, metastasis, and resistance to chemotherapy. “We believe it is central to driving metastasis,” Padmanabhan says.

Early data also suggest high levels of ZNF217 might cause changes in the chemical environment inside a tumor, which impacts how a patient responds to different therapeutics. “If we can reduce ZNF217 in tumor cells, there is the potential to extend the life of the patient and give other therapies a chance to work more effectively,” Padmanabhan explains.

With the new grant, Padmanabhan and his students will further explore the effects of ZNF217 on ovarian cancer progression, treatment resistance, and the environment inside tumors. If the lab can confirm its preliminary data about ZNF217’s significant role in ovarian cancer, they will then explore their hypotheses for how to reduce the amount of ZNF217 in cancer cells, thereby reducing its detrimental effects.  

Overall, the work has the potential to significantly increase treatment options and improve outcomes for patients.

Exploring every angle

At the same time, the $387,000 Pilot Award will allow Padmanabhan’s team to test different combinations of existing cancer drugs in cell lines and in mice. Some of these drugs target a tumor suppressor protein called p53. In cancer cells, p53 is frequently mutated in such a way that it helps the tumor grow rather than suppressing it. In the most lethal version of ovarian cancer, p53 is mutated more than 96 percent of the time, Padmanabhan explains.

“We think the new drug combinations will more effectively target mutated p53, and because the drugs are already approved for use in cancer patients, effective new combinations could be translated to the clinic more quickly,” Padmanabhan says.

The work for both new grants builds on support Padmanabhan previously received, which includes  internal sources at UMBC. UMBC’s Alex Brown Center for Entrepreneurship CENTRE Funding Initiative, the UMBC Technology Catalyst Fund, and the Accelerated Translational Incubator Pilot (a joint grant program between University of Maryland, Baltimore and UMBC), as well as external funders like the Rivkin Foundation and Elsa U. Pardee Foundation, have supported Padmanabhan’s work. “All of this support got us to the DoD grant,” he says.

It takes a team

Padmanabhan is a strong believer in involving students in research, and his lab’s new projects will be no exception. The grant will allow him to hire another postdoctoral fellow, and there are currently several graduate and undergraduate students in the lab who will contribute their energy to this work. Dedicated high school students are also welcome. He gives every lab member an independent project, and several have made key contributions that got the lab to the place it is now.

Kathryn Wardrup, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Padmanabhan’s lab, generated the bulk of the data that led to the Academy grant. Noel Amadu, M.S. ’20, applied molecular biology, and Megha Pandya, M.S. ’21, applied molecular biology, generated data that led to the DoD Pilot Award. Amadu is in the third-year of his Ph.D., and Pandya is in her first year—although she previously worked with Padmanabhan in the applied molecular biology program and then as a laboratory technician. 

“It’s important for students to realize how challenging and rewarding research can be,” Padmanabhan says, “and it’s most rewarding when you have something you can call yours.”

Having a large team will help the group make progress on several scientific questions at once. “All of our previous work is coming together in these new grants,” Padmanabhan says. While it is still early days in their line of research, there is high potential for it to translate to clinical trials later on and have a major impact on the future of ovarian cancer treatment—which is Padmanabhan’s overarching goal.   

“There’s a lot that needs to be understood at the basic science level that will hopefully allow us to translate it someday,” Padmanabhan says. “I guess that’s every person’s dream—you just want to help people.”

Blackboard course shells for FA2023 were created on July 25, 2023. 

The Ultra Course Preview setting is enabled in FA2023 courses, which allows faculty to preview OR convert a new Original course to Ultra. The recommendation, however, is to create a new course to optimize the design. Note: The last day we will support Blackboard Original is December 31, 2024.

• Please review the release notes for the latest updates as well as feature parity charts -- more than 200 new updates were added over the last year! 
• Discover What's New in Ultra for Teaching & Learning on August 10 or 18.
• Attend an Intro to Blackboard Ultra in 45 Minutes or Less training on August 9 or 15. 
• Recent hires may be interested in the New Faculty Evening Orientation on August 9 or 17.
• Review 5 best practices to prepare your Ultra gradebook on August 22.
• Enroll in our self-paced workshop, Ultra for Instructors, designed to provide a starting point to help you prepare your courses in Ultra.
• Have a question about Ultra? Ask an Ultra Ambassador!

As previously announced, seven departments, many foreign languages, English 100, IHU, FYE, and TRS courses have opted into Ultra to ensure a consistent approach for their students. This means courses will start with Ultra by default rather than Original. For consistency of instructional technology support, FA2023 courses created in Blackboard on/after August 1, 2023 will be created in Ultra by default.

Plan your accessibility and Universal Design for Learning strategy before students begin working with course materials. Ally, an accessibility tool, is enabled in all course shells. Ally automatically scans uploaded and created course content, then performs a series of steps to make that content more accessible. Please review the Ally FAQs for more information about the accessibility indicators on course content and alternative formats, or attend a training session.

For faculty who will be teaching hybrid or online, the instructional technology team would like to share several resources to support online course development and instruction.

1. Choose from our PIVOT Solo lessons to refresh or enhance your online teaching preparation. Five key topics cover course organization, active learning, community building, assessment, and supporting students. 
2. Explore our Panopto folder for a wide variety of recorded webinars on various instructional technologies available at UMBC.
3. Learn about the Quality Matters Impact program, a new initiative to formally recognize courses that meet Quality Matters standards and demonstrate exemplary online/hybrid course design.

• If you are an instructor, and your name is not associated with the course you are teaching in the SOC, please see your Departmental Scheduling Coordinator to resolve the issue. Once you are listed in the SOC, your Bb course shell will be created automatically. 
• If you and your Department Scheduling Coordinator believe you are correctly assigned as the instructor of record in the SOC and you do not see your course shell in Blackboard, please submit a Request Tracker (RT) ticket via my.umbc.edu/help.
• If you need a Bb shell for a research or independent study course, please submit a new course request.

Instructors who teach multiple sections of the same course will find those enrollments merged into one Bb course shell. These sections may be split upon request by an RT ticket, which we recommend submitting at least one week before the semester starts, if not as soon as courses are created in Blackboard. NOTE: Courses should not be split after student grade data and engagement activity is recorded since it will be purged as part of the separation process.

Student enrollment in Bb mirrors the official registration in SA and updates hourly. However, courses are not accessible to students by default until the instructor of record makes them available.

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