DoD CySP Cybersecurity Scholarships at UMBC

UMBC participates in the CySP scholarship (formerly IASP) funded by the Department of Defense (DoD). This full-ride scholarship is available for rising junior and senior undergraduate and graduate students who are studying cybersecurity. Scholars gain hands-on experience through information security internships, and post-graduation is required to fulfill one year of service to the DoD.

US citizenship is required. For full-time rising juniors, MS, MPS, or Ph.D. students in cybersecurity-related programs at UMBC (including CMSC, CE, IS, Cyber). Must be capable of obtaining a top-secret security clearance. Must agree to work for DoD. We seek strong students with a high GPA (> 3.0), high test scores, cybersecurity experience, strong upper-level technical courses, passion for cybersecurity, dedicated to working for the government.

For employees enrolled in the MD State Retirement & Pension system, the schedule of Pre-Retirement seminars and webinars is now available for January – June 2023.

These seminars are a valuable planning tool for all eligible members and their spouses, provided by the MD State Pension Agency via the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC). Employees who attend should be within 8 years of retiring.

Please register for an in-person seminar or webinar using this link: http://www.ccbcmd.edu/ceed-preretirement-state or by calling 443-840-5059. Please provide the course number when registering. 

*NOTE: all in-person seminars and webinars run from 9:00am - 4:00pm.

Webinar Dates:

• January 24 (CRN 37246) 
• February 14 (CRN 37249)
• March 14 (CRN 37278)
• March 30 (CRN 37275)
• April 13 (CRN 37254) 
• April 26 (CRN 37256)  
• May 18 (CRN 37263) 
• June 6 (CRN 37258)  

IN-PERSON seminar dates: 

• February 10 – CCBC Essex Campus (CRN 37161)
• March 15 – Anne Arundel Health Department (CRN 37280)
• April 14 – Salisbury University (CRN 37440)
• April 25 – Salisbury Government (CRN 37455) *Law Enforcement Officers Only (LEOPS)
• April 28 – Harford Community College (CRN 37257)
• May 2 – CCBC Owings Mills Center (CRN 37442)
• May 17 – Maryland School for the Deaf Columbia Campus (CRN 37444) *ASL provided
• June 15 – Hagerstown Community College (CRN 37259)
• June 22 – CCBC Catonsville Campus (CRN 37245)

To register for a seminar or webinar, please go to: http://www.ccbcmd.edu/ceed-preretirement-state

This link includes directions for registering by phone if you encounter difficulties registering online. If you have questions or need assistance, please contact Sarah Moore at scullip@ccbcmd.edu. 

It’s rare to meet a mathematician who is also a bestselling novelist, but UMBC’s Manil Suri, professor of mathematics, is happy to be unique. Suri is the author of a famed trilogy named for Hindu gods, including The Death of Vishnu (2001), which was long-listed for the Booker Prize, The Age of Shiva (2008), and The City of Devi (2013). He recently published his latest book, The Big Bang of Numbers: How to Build the Universe Using Only Math, to global acclaim. 

The Big Bang of Numbers is Suri’s first nonfiction book, written to show people who aren’t necessarily fond of math that the discipline is foundational to our world—and can even be fun.

“The concept is intriguing, if hard to get your head around: Can you understand the creation of the universe purely through basic mathematics?” writes The Washingtonian. Suri’s answer with The Big Bang of Numbers is a resounding ‘yes.’ The book “explores many areas of seemingly pure math that explain the natural world, from the shapes of galaxies and living creatures to weather, gravity, beauty, and even art,” Kirkus Reviewswrites.  

In his role as math professor, Suri works hard to convince his students that math doesn’t just matter, it is also endlessly interesting—extending his instruction well beyond the basics of calculations and into the field’s fundamental ideas. 

“All your life, you keep hearing that maths is all about calculations,” Suri told Telegraph India, “while in essence, maths is all about ideas.” Suri first expounded on this theme in a 2013 New York Times op-ed, “How to Fall in Love with Math.” When the op-ed became shockingly popular, the idea for a book grew from there.

A new challenge

With The Big Bang of Numbers, which the Wall Street Journal has called “imaginative and organized,” Suri isn’t just seeking to help a wider audience understand or feel comfortable with math, but feel a sense of fascination with it. According to the Mathematical Association of America, Suri’s approach—rich in humor and narrative elements—goes beyond “simply telling the reader about these ideas”; instead, he “allow[s] readers to experience the attitude of curious exploration that attracts mathematicians to the discipline, but is often absent from low-level math classes.”

“With evocative and engaging examples ranging from multidimensional crochet to the Mona Lisa’s asymmetrical smile, as well as ingenious storytelling that helps illuminate complex concepts like infinity and relativity, The Big Bang of Numbers charts a playful, inventive course to existence,” writes the Deccan Herald, which named the book its “read of the week” in mid-October.

For Suri, while the book was very different in some ways from his previous works of fiction, The Big Bang of Numbers hews closely to his style that relies on humor and engaging narrative to draw the reader into unfamiliar topics. His novels all take place in India, a place that feels far away and unknown to many of his readers. “After explaining India in three internationally released books to many readers who didn’t know much about the country, I was ready to take on an even bigger challenge,” he told Frontline, a major English-language magazine in India, “—explaining mathematics to a general audience!”

Math as a game

“Usually math is thought of as something that we invent, perhaps, to explain things around us. I’m kind of reversing this perspective and saying that math is the true driver of the universe, and the universe itself is a model of the mathematical principles,” Suri recently told NPR’s Marketplace.

Put another way, the Sunday Times of London explains the central thesis of the book is that “maths, the creative language in which reality is written, is ‘the life force that drives the universe,’ and you could build one—stars, worlds, you and me—from scratch using maths alone.” The review notes, “It sounds intimidating, but Suri has a knack for clarity and a welcome habit of grounding tricky concepts in the tangible.”

In the end, according to Suri’s book, math is a “force that forever enthralls, not just through the answers it gives but also through the new mysteries it poses.” But he hopes his readers will also understand math as a game. 

“For mathematicians, I suspect the most appealing characteristic of the subject is its playfulness,” Suri told Frontline. “Maths is a game in which you start with a bunch of rules and then deduce away to see where you can get. You can play it anywhere—in the shower, on the bus, while eating lunch—all you need is your mind.”

Are you a student looking for a class to spark your entrepreneurial spirit? UMBC offers courses specifically designed to help YOU learn about the basic principles of entrepreneurship, how to cultivate an entrepreneurial mindset, and more! 

There are still seats left for the Spring 2023 semester in the Introduction to Entrepreneurship, The Entrepreneurial Mindset, and Entrepreneurial Marketing. Entrepreneurship is for Everyone!

To learn more about the courses and the minor, click the link below!

On a recent Tuesday in December, UMBC’s Carlos Romero-Talamás escorted a TV crew from Baltimore into one of his labs. The reporters were there to talk about a just announced fusion power milestone achieved at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, but they quickly became interested in Romero-Talamás’s own experiments too. He is questing after the same fusion milestone using equipment that’s much simpler and cheaper.

Bringing the energy of the stars to Earth

Fusion is the atomic engine that powers stars. Inside the cores of these celestial infernos, fast-moving hydrogen atoms, stripped of their electrons, ricochet around. Occasionally they collide in such ways that they transform into helium atoms. When that happens, a lot of energy is released.

For decades, humanity has dreamed of harnessing fusion power on Earth to make safe, clean, and near limitless energy. But thorny physics and engineering challenges made the goal elusive, with scientists coming to joke that “fusion power is 30 years away—and always will be.”

Yet now, a growing excitement is displacing some of the skepticism. Governments are directing more money toward fusion research and private investors such as Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are collectively pitching in billions of dollars. Some companies are promising commercial fusion power in 10 years.

Romero-Talamás’s own work has benefited from the renewed attention. In 2020, he was awarded a $4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to explore a promising alternative to traditional fusion power approaches. Rather than blast hydrogen atoms with lasers (the approach used at Lawrence Livermore) or squeeze them into a donut-shaped ring using enormous magnets (the approach epitomized by the multi-billion-dollar, nearly 100-foot-tall ITER fusion reactor under construction in France), Romero-Talamás and his team plan to confine their hydrogen atoms in a supersonic whirlwind shaped by a novel arrangement of magnets and an electrically conducting central rod.

If the concept works, it could lead to a commercial fusion reactor relatively quickly, Romero-Talamás says, because it uses equipment that is smaller, cheaper, and simpler to operate than the equipment required by other approaches.

A simpler fusion reactor

Romero-Talamás’ team, which includes collaborators from the University of Maryland, College Park, has already built a test machine in a lab on the College Park campus. While the machine does not have the capacity to operate as an energy-generating reactor, initial experiments on it show the hydrogen atoms are being trapped in the whirlwind as hoped. If experiments continue to go well, the team will soon begin work on a bigger, next-generation machine. That machine could be fitted to produce more power than it takes to run, a key milestone on the road to commercial fusion power.

We sat down to chat with Romero-Talamás about the wonder of fusion and the excitement of scientists who feel they may be on the cusp of world-changing innovations. The following interview has been edited for brevity.

Conversation with Carlos Romero-Talamás

UMBC News: It feels like fusion is having a moment. Do you agree?

Romero-Talamás: The announcement from Lawrence Livermore gained a lot of attention, but fusion has actually been having a moment, so to speak, for the last few years. And the reason these years have been different is because the private sector got interested. The amount of money they bring is changing the equation. I’ve told people our concept will take tens of millions of dollars for the next machine—which is not a reactor, but a reactor-sized experiment—and they don’t even flinch. They are people who are used to handling that kind of money. 

UMBC News: What are some of the challenges that remain?

Romero-Talamás: There are still big questions. Some are about the physics—how the particles behave. Some are engineering—how are you actually going to build something that can operate day in and day out. We also need people, not just graduate students, but also technicians who know the technology. 

Some of these fusion companies and concepts are probably going to fail. And hopefully, that won’t spook the investors, because the success of one will be beneficial to everyone.

UMBC News: How did you get interested in fusion?

Romero-Talamás: When I was an undergraduate, there was a fusion experiment where for a brief amount of time they produced about 60% of the energy they put in. I had never heard of fusion until then—that’s when I learned about it. I thought, “Okay, by the time I’m a scientist, they are going to have fusion reactors.” Of course, that didn’t happen.

But in graduate school, I learned about fusion energy more from the fundamental physics side, and I thought it was fascinating. I actually got funding as a student to go to Lawrence Livermore, and I did a lot of my research there.

UMBC News: What excites you about this research?

Romero-Talamás: We all need energy, and many metrics even measure a country’s economic strength by the amount of energy it produces and consumes. Fusion is considered the “holy grail” of energy. It could provide virtually unlimited energy for millions of years. It is clean and carbon free. I think finally it is getting the attention it deserves.

And, of course, the students are the heart of the work. They believe they can change the world.

Longstanding food insecurity problems in the U.S. and around the world, exacerbated by the pandemic, are projected to increase over the coming decades, as food, water, and energy demands increase and environmental crises worsen. With this in mind, the National Science Foundation (NSF) is investing $11 million toward solutions to address the nutritional needs of vulnerable and under-resourced communities through its Convergence Accelerator Program. 

UMBC’s Lauren Clay, associate professor and chair of emergency health services, is one 16 Convergence Accelerator awardees selected for Phase I of the program. Clay was awarded $624,000 for her project to improve food system resilience and decrease disaster-induced food insecurity in communities impacted by hurricanes.

Supporting food system resilience

Clay’s proposal explains that 11-15 percent of the U.S. population experienced food insecurity annually between 2008 and 2018, and households that are struggling with food insecurity before a disaster are at greatest risk for serious food access issues when a disaster strikes, and long after. 

“Food and nutrition insecurity rates can increase threefold following disasters,” Clay notes. “Increased food and nutrition insecurity rates persist for years while households and communities recover.”

“Communities across the U.S. are planning for growing threats related to climate disasters. Food security is a basic human need and is highly susceptible to disruption when families and communities experience disasters,” says Clay. “I’m excited to work with a multi-disciplinary and multi-sector team to develop a new tool for measuring community food security to support communities planning for, responding to, and recovering from hurricanes.”

Converging on solutions

The NSF Convergence Accelerator Program seeks to address national-scale challenges in science, engineering, and society through a collaborative research process that brings together expertise from multiple scientific disciplines, known as convergence research. The food and nutrition focus was recently added to the Convergence Accelerator, which also includes approaches towards combating challenges related to population health and climate change.

“We hope to create a group of synergistic efforts that advance regenerative agriculture practices, reduce water usage, provide equitable access to nutritious and affordable food for disadvantaged communities, and spur technology and job creation,” says Douglas Maughan, head of the Convergence Accelerator, in NSF’s announcement of award recipients. 

Over the course of nine months, Clay and her team will work to develop the Food Index for Resilience, Security, & Tangible Solutions, called FIRST. This index will measure food system functioning in communities and is intended to be a resource that can be used to respond to and recover from disasters and environmental changes. 

This effort builds on Clay’s prior and ongoing research to address disaster-specific food insecurity issues. She was also recently awarded an NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award to develop a sociocultural model called Food Environment in Disasters (FED) and other tools to improve the understanding and monitoring of food availability, acceptability, and accessibility during disasters. 

Following Phase I of this project, participating teams will take part in a formal pitch and Phase II proposal and could receive up to $5 million of additional support. Selected Phase II teams will further develop their solutions and sustainability development plans over the course of 24 months, to rapidly meet the needs of global communities.