• The new regulations go into effect on August 14, 2020. If you have a case currently under investigation with OEI, the process for investigating and reviewing your case will not change. 
  
• Between now and August, when the new regulations take effect, we will work with the University System of Maryland, the Maryland Attorney General’s Office, and campus partners to ensure that our policies and procedures align with the new federal regulations, Maryland laws, court decisions, and our community values.
  
• There might be legal challenges to some of these regulations, which could delay or modify them.
  

Hello UMBC LSAMP Community! 

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Hello UMBC LSAMP Community! 

We are inviting you to join us through WebEx over the next few weeks for two different session types. 

On Thursdays, we will hold opportunities for students to check-in and offer support to one another as we all continue to adjust to remote learning. This will be an opportunity to re-engage with friends and cultivate new relationships with students who major in STEM. There will be two sessions each Thursday, 11-12 and 12-1.

On Fridays, we will gather to discuss where we are in the graduate school application process and offer feedback on strengthening application materials. Based on where students are in the process, we will bring in guest speakers to offer tips on the graduate school application process. These sessions are best suited for students applying to graduate school this coming fall. There will be two sessions each Friday, 11-12 and 12-1.

We understand that some of you might have class and can only join us for a portion of a session. That is ok! 

LSAMP Thursday Hangouts

LSAMP Friday Graduate School Prep

Feel free to join us for multiple sessions.
Register at: https://doodle.com/poll/9dk3qceu37vzaq83

Students who register will receive a Webex invitation with log-in information from peterd@umbc.edu.

Follow us on Instagram and Twitter: https://www.instagram.com/usm_lsamp/ and https://twitter.com/umbc_lsamp

Hi everyone! Hope you're all staying safe and healthy. I am moving out of my shared apartment in the end of May and am looking for someone to take over the lease.

We are seeking a quiet, tidy female roommate to rent a room in a two bedroom apartment in Catonsville. The room would be available starting in June with the lease ending at the end of August. There is also the option to stay through the upcoming school year, if you're interested. The apartment includes a full kitchen with a dishwasher, and there are also laundry facilities in the building. The apartment is located on a quiet street surrounded by trees, is about 10 minutes from UMBC, and also has easy access to UMBC's shuttle route. Rent is a little less than $630/month plus gas and internet.

You would be sharing the apartment with a UMBC graduate who currently works full time on campus. Her hobbies include yoga, meditation, gardening, and photography. We are looking for someone who is quiet, studious, and does not have a lot of people over. 

If you're interested, you can shoot me an email at janita1@umbc.edu and I can connect you with your potential new roommate.

The University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s Office of Equity and Inclusion added two new members to its proposed five-person team over the past two months, who plan to work to increase the office’s outreach and training efforts. Their efforts also aim to build the community’s trust in UMBC’s Title IX and anti-discrimination processes. 

Mikhel Kushner, who was the first full-time professional director of the UMBC Women’s Center in 2000, joined the OEI in March as UMBC’s new Title IX coordinator, and B. Ever Hanna, who served as the policy director for End Rape on Campus, a national survivor advocacy organization, joined in late February as the Training and Case Manager.

Kushner and Hanna have been working alongside Ariana Arnold, the director of OEI, as the university transitioned to remote work. The office, which reports to Candace Dodson-Reed, the chief of staff and executive director of OEI, has been granted special permission to hire two Title IX investigators despite the university-wide hiring pause.

Arnold, Kushner and Hanna are currently working to process remaining Title IX cases that were filed earlier in the semester, which Kushner said has given the office a chance to evaluate what about the current process works and what may need updating.

The OEI staff members are also working to do more community outreach, which previously meant showing up in-person to different organizational and departmental meetings around campus, but now means showing up in video conferences. 

Kushner, who is coming from a position as the executive director of Diversity and Inclusion and also as the Title IX coordinator at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, said that the office is currently thinking through how they can be more available when students, faculty and staff return to campus, noting that their office location — the ninth floor of the Administration building — may be an obstacle for people. 

She hopes that this initial outreach will help students feel more comfortable with the office and wants students to know that “we’ll come to them. We’re not stagnant.”

The OEI, which handles complaints related to UMBC’s Title IX and anti-discrimination policies, launched an online reporting form in late February. This new form allows the option for anonymous reporting, a feature Kushner called a “valuable and important tool,” while also acknowledging the limits it places on the office’s ability to help a person in crisis. 

That’s where resource sharing comes in. Though the OEI’s website is still under construction, Kushner said that the website will be used to more clearly share the work OEI does and the resources it provides, which she hopes will help students, faculty and staff gain a better understanding of the office’s purpose and the options available to those experiencing trauma. Hanna is hoping to add resources that are both culturally specific and that also reflect the UMBC community as it grows and changes. 

The office’s outreach work will also be supported by comprehensive in-person training, provided by Hanna, who is responsible for creating a new training curriculum. As a part of this training, Hanna is also planning to work with faculty and staff to ensure not only that they know how to report instances of sexual harassment and sexual violence but also that that they have the language to understand gender identity. 

Though UMBC has not yet decided what the fall semester will look like, Hanna is preparing for the possibility that UMBC will have to move training courses online and is working to offer courses that are “still interactive and informative and worth the time of the students, faculty and staff who are taking them,” they said. 

In addition to the outreach and training efforts, Hanna and Kushner face another, less tangible challenge: building trust in the community. 

Both Kushner and Hanna trace their start in work surrounding Title IX and anti-discrimination policy to their own years in college. Kushner served as the Crozier Center for Women’s student manager while she attended Kenyon College, and Hanna pushed their administration at Boston University to establish a rape crisis center in their senior year, resulting in BU’s Sexual Assault Response and Prevention Center. 

They both remember being affected by the release of the 2011 Dear Colleague letter, which prompted them to start staying up-to-date on Title IX news. Kushner was in the Caribbean, fresh out of law school and working in student conduct for a medical school. The school did not have a Title IX coordinator, since it did not have an athletics program, but she began to request one. Soon enough, she became the Title IX coordinator.

“ … it was almost as if I was being primed to become a Title IX coordinator without us even knowing that Title IX coordinators would be doing the work that they’re doing now,” Kushner said.

Hanna had much of the same experience. While in law school, a second Dear Colleague letter came out, this time about discriminating facing transgender students. Hanna took that letter to the Title IX office and used it to advocate for the support they needed. After law school, Hanna worked providing legal services to young people in foster care and later moved to End Rape on Campus after realizing the career path they were following. 

“I had this experience … that a lot of people told me I would have when I was young where I looked back at my experiences and the things I was interested in, and I was kind of like, ‘Oh, I’ve always done this work, but I never realized that this is what I was doing,’” Hanna said.  

Hanna and Kushner hope to make the OEI an office where students, faculty and staff feel as if they have been and can be heard, regardless of the outcome of a case. 

“Our office’s work is in large part neutral work,” Kushner later stated in an email. “I hold space for everyone who comes to me, even if what they’re saying sounds like the exact opposite of what the other person in the same situation is saying to me. It’s important that I’m hearing what each person has to say, and that they trust me to be hearing their perspective, their truth, their version of events.”   

Hanna emphasized a “trauma-informed” approach to the office’s work, noting that they should be able to meet with students, faculty and staff and be kind and supportive so that the process of reporting does not make a person’s trauma worse.

“We want to have a process that … [is] fair and equitable to everyone but also makes sure that everyone who’s participating feels like they are getting support and resources from our office and that we feel like a place that’s approachable and that can be trusted,” Hanna said. “It’s a really tricky line to walk, but I’m hopeful that we can do it.”

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Mikhel Kushner founded the Women’s Center. Rather, she was the first full-time professional director of the Women’s Center.

Some classes translate better to remote learning than others. There was no way for students in Adam Mendelson’s advanced lighting design class to emulate the experience of programming and running massive lighting rigs from their homes. But, as it turns out, there are lessons about lighting design to be learned even in one’s own bedroom.

Mendelson, a senior lecturer in the Theatre Department, and his students discovered this after one of their projects—design lights to accompany a reading of a poem—had to be transferred to online. Students were given the option to complete the project using online simulation software or take a hands-on approach by using the lights sources available in their house.

The DIY students used whatever materials they had on hand, from Christmas lights to flashlights to simply opening or closing the blinds of a window. About half of the class went this route, enlisting the help of family members and housemates to flip switches or plug lights in on cue, one even used their dog as a lighting model. 

This experimental assignment has proven successful; Mendelson was pleased with the creativity and innovation his students have shown. “One person used three or four different desk lamps that they put different colored light bulbs in,” he says. Another student used t-shirts and papers to change the colors of flashlights. “He took apart a shoebox and he put five chess pieces in it and that was the surface he was lighting,” Mendselson says. “It was really beautiful.”

“As a lighting designer for a theatrical or a live event, every single thing that lights up is in your purview,” says Mendelson as a takeaway from the at-home version of this assignment. “Sometimes it’s something you can control and sometimes it’s not,” he explains, using green “exit” signs in a space as an example of something that the lighting designer might have to account for. “The key to lighting design is controlling the light and putting the light where you want it to go.”

Other assignments have been more challenging to translate to a distance-learning format; traditionally, students in the class have the opportunity to light a live dance performance, but those shows were canceled. Nothing can replace that live experience, says Mendelson. “That objective of being in the room and having to make quick decisions and all of that is practically impossible to recreate.” Instead, he is asking students to attend a supplemental webinar or online class to help fill in the knowledge gaps left behind by the sudden pivot to online learning.

Testing the Waters

Suzanne Braunschweig, a senior lecturer in the department of Geography and Environmental Systems and director of the Interdisciplinary Science Program, has also faced the challenge of transferring hands-on lessons into a digital space. Science 100: Water, An Interdisciplinary Study, the GEP lab science course she teaches, usually involves traveling to the creeks and streams on campus to collect data, but, because of the dangers of COVID-19, many students can no longer even go into their backyards to collect data.

The solution, Braunschweig has found, is to give her students virtual lab assignments that mirror the course’s in-person labs as closely as possible. One assignment, for instance, typically involves going to a nearby stream to find and identify benthic macroinvertebrates—small organisms that live in the bottoms of lakes and streams. In the virtual lab, students will still go through the same steps of identification that they would in person, albeit using high-quality photographs rather than real organisms.

In a typical Science 100 class, like this one in Spring 2018, students test the water in the Library and Pig Pen ponds. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11.

According to Braunschweig, the analysis aspect of the lab will also be essentially the same as it would be in a traditional classroom setting: “Based on the assemblage of critters that you find, you can then make conclusions about the quality of the stream from which they would’ve come.” Usually, she notes, students are excited to find that the streams on campus are “in good shape.”

Transitioning to running online labs has been far from a solo project—Braunschweig’s colleague Susan Schreier and several teaching assistants have assisted with finding virtual materials and making sure the labs run smoothly. She has also utilized a number of invaluable online resources, such as data collected by local nonprofit Blue Water Baltimore. 

As part of its mission to restore the quality of Baltimore’s waterways, Blue Water Baltimore maintains a database of information about the health of Baltimore’s rivers and streams. This data has proven to be a “godsend,” says Braunschweig, replacing data students would have sampled from streams around the Baltimore area.

“It’s not doing hands-on work, but they still have the ability to analyze data, and put things in context for the greater Baltimore area in terms of water quality,” Braunschweig says.

Braunschweig knows that most of her students take Science 100 to fulfill a general education requirement, but she’s found that they are still giving their all, even remotely.

 “They show up, they stick around, they actually try to work through the lab material during their lab time,” Braunschweig says. “I really admire them for sticking to that because it’s hard, under the current circumstances.”

Lending a (Virtual) Hand

While instructors of hands-on courses knew from the start how difficult this pivot would be, Kate Drabinski, lecturer of Gender, Women’s, + Sexuality Studies, never could have anticipated how much she still had to learn about online teaching. After all, she had years of experience with teaching online and hybrid courses, and had even signed up to help train her fellow professors how to use various distance learning technologies.

But the technical side of things didn’t turn out to be the biggest challenge for faculty to navigate, Drabinski says. “The faculty I worked with needed to know that what they were planning to do was a good idea and would work,” she explains. “They needed to hear that we could do this, that we were all unsure of what our new classrooms would look like, and that we would be able to find strategies that would work to keep us and our students moving forward in a time of great uncertainty.”

For Drabinski’s own classes, the strategy has been to decrease the amount of work students have to complete. “We don’t all have equal access to technology, workspaces, time, or other resources to learn best, and my workload has to respect those differences,” she says. She also knows that it can be difficult for students to give schoolwork their full attention when they are contending with the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic, such as losing their jobs or having to take care of sick family members.

She has also opted to use a synchronous learning approach paired with recorded lectures. That way, she meets with her students in Blackboard Collaborate during her regularly scheduled class times but each student can decide whether they prefer to come to class or watch the video later.

“This approach builds structure for those who need it while recognizing that others have different needs,” Drabinski explains.

Continuing Connections

UMBC professors aren’t the only ones leading the charge into remote learning. Atom Zerfas ’13, mathematics, M.A., ’14, education and teaching, a math teacher at Pikesville High School, played a pivotal role in introducing the students at PHS to how the final quarter of the school year would play out. He created a video to help guide students through what their new class schedule would look like, how they would access online materials, and how they would get in contact with their instructors.

He decided to make the video after seeing how stressful the transfer to remote learning was on the teachers’ end. “It was extremely overwhelming for us, functioning adults who are supposed to be able to ‘be the calm’ for our students,” he explains. “I couldn’t imagine what it would have been like to be a student in any grade, wondering what this means for them. I wanted to provide as many answers that I could, as soon as I could.”

Zerfas originally made the three-and-a-half minute video for the students in his classes, but then restructured it so that the entire school could use it as a resource. Later, he found out that teachers at other high schools were using his video, despite it being tailored to how PHS, specifically, was restructuring its curriculum.

Online teaching isn’t entirely new to Zerfas. He has been uploading recorded lectures for a few years now in an effort to support students who missed class or just need a refresher on the material. The videos he is making now, however, have a purpose beyond education; he wants them to be a beacon for his students. 

Video lectures give Zerfas the chance to say “Hi,” he says, and “let my students know that I’m thinking about them, and show them that I’m here if they need me for anything. I know a number of other teachers are dressing up, wearing wigs, or trying to make it as fun as they can. It really comes down to use trying to reconnect with our students, support them, and restore a sense of normalcy and joy.”

In addition to keeping in contact with his students, Zerfas has also been making sure to maintain another important connection these past few weeks: “I’m lucky to have been part of UMBC’s Sherman program because I’ve been connecting with a lot of my cohort members recently, and we’ve just been checking in with each other and being as supportive as we can.”

Making Permanent Change

Though distance learning will not always be necessary, instructors at UMBC and beyond are proving that they are capable of delivering online lessons that are compelling, stimulating, and sometimes even fun for students. Perhaps this unusual semester will give way to lasting, innovative teaching practices, from providing recorded lectures to maintaining more open lines of communication between professors and students.

Ultimately, though, the biggest takeaway lies not in any particular teaching strategy or technological tool. Rather, what we all must learn from this pandemic is that the UMBC community is strong enough to overcome great adversity—but only when we are able to be patient and understanding of each other’s unique challenges and circumstances.

“Not all students have the ability to study or do their [homework] in peace. It’s just more noticeable now,” Zerfas says. “That doesn’t mean to stop offering resources or to stop pushing your kids to do more, but to differentiate lessons more and not to penalize the kids who couldn’t do it.”

*****
Header image: Pig Pen Pond, a common Science 100 site, sits between campus and bwtech@UMBC.

Katherine Seley-Radtke, professor of chemistry and biochemistry, has received a six-month Fast Grant to test antiviral compounds developed in her lab for effectiveness against COVID-19. Collaborators on the grant include Chuck Bieberich, professor of biological sciences at UMBC, and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University and Cornell University.

“A normal NIH grant takes almost a year from submission to receiving the money, and in this time of crisis, we don’t have that luxury,” Seley-Radtke says. “The Fast Grants program awards funding in days, thus allowing us to get critical results immediately.” The Fast Grants are funded by a consortium of entrepreneurs, investors, and innovators, and applications are judged by a panel of biomedical experts. 

The grants have only been given to the most promising projects that can return results quickly. Many have gone to some of the most prestigious research institutions in the world, including Stanford University, MIT, and Columbia University. “We are honored to be included in such company,” Seley-Radtke says.

A flexible approach

Seley-Radtke’s research has already shown that her compounds act powerfully against viruses such as Ebola, MERS, SARS, Zika, Dengue, and other human coronaviruses that cause cold symptoms. The compounds work similarly to Remdesivir, another antiviral compound undergoing trials for its efficacy against COVID-19. Seley-Radtke’s compounds are distinctive in that their structure allows them to adopt different shapes, affording them several advantages over Remdesivir.

These “fleximers,” as Seley-Radtke has named them, interfere with two different viral enzymes that the virus needs to replicate; Remdesivir interferes with just one. The fleximers stop the viral enzymes without harming very similar human ones, which is critical to making the compounds safe, Seley-Radtke explains.

The fleximers can also avoid being rendered inactive by a coronavirus defense mechanism. Coronaviruses have a special enzyme that seeks out and removes unnatural compounds that the virus has mistakenly incorporated into its replication process. The fleximers’ ability to take on different shapes protects them from this defense. The compounds’ flexibility also helps them maintain potency in the face of viral resistance.

“Given that recent reports suggest more than 40 different strains of SARS CoV-2 are currently circulating, the ability to avoid resistant mechanisms will be critical for developing a clinically relevant antiviral,” Seley-Radtke says.

Gathering crucial data

These compounds have already shown activity against SARS COV-2 in test tubes, but there are still many steps in the journey toward an approved drug for human use, including studies in animals and then human trials.

“Our efforts for the Fast Grant award will be focused on obtaining the critical animal data needed to move these potent compounds toward clinical trials,” Seley-Radtke says. “Although we have been working on SARS, MERS, and human coronaviruses for a number of years, the awarding of these funds is indeed validation of the importance of our work. And it is particularly important given the urgency due to the ongoing pandemic.”

Seley-Radtke has also been active in sharing her expertise in the media, including writing articles for The Conversation that have garnered nearly 800,000 reads. She has also spoken with news outlets such as theBBC,Washington Post,NPR,Washington Examiner, and many more.

Banner image: Katherine Seley-Radtke. Photo by Matt Radtke.

Other photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Hey Folks, We have a vacancy for 1 person in our townhouse. The available room is pretty big with a walk in closet. Bathroom is shared with another individual. Rent is 483$ excluding utility bills ($40 - $60 per person).

We have an extra guest room, dining room, hall and, backyard. The house is equipped with dishwasher, washing machine, few gym gears and, kitchen amenities. The address is 5135 Westland Blvd, walking distance from UMBC and on Arbutus Shuttle route. It is a 4 bedroom house to be occupied by 3 people. Earliest moving date can be 1st July.

I have attached some pics of place when we moved in. We have a little more usable furniture added now. Send me an email at kj11@umbc.edu if interested.