This story was first published here and was written by Tom Moore.
Timothy Nohe, director of the Center for Innovation, Research and Creativity in the Arts (CIRCA) and professor of visual arts, is featured in a one-person exhibition at the Kohl Gallery on the campus of Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. The show, which opened Thursday, November 9, and continues through Friday, December 15, is entitled Voltage is Signal: Analog Video Works by Timothy Nohe and features works that explore analog video technology in innovative ways.
A 2015 residency at Signal Culture (Owego, New York) inspired Nohe’s work with analog modular video synthesis, and since then he has gone on to exhibit and screen video and interactive works at major public festivals such as Light City Baltimore 2017 and Artscape. His interactive exhibits, autonomous video generating circuits, installations and prints simultaneously look back and forward to technologies that slip between obsolescence and contemporary “glitch” culture. Nohe’s show at the Kohl Gallery in many ways marks a new direction, as he departs from a typically more image-based practice to consider the ways that voltages might produce abstractions. The resulting works are resonant of past traditions, from color field to Pop, even as they emerge from an interrogation of various media. A number of the works on display call for audience interaction, long a characteristic of Nohe’s work.
Professor Nohe will return to Washington College for a public talk on his work on Thursday, November 16 at 4:30 p.m. He will also participate in a production of the modern dance LightForest by Baltimore Dance Project, directed and choreographed by Carol Hess, chair of UMBC’s department of dance, at Washington College on November 17 and 18. Nohe composed the score for LightForest for mobile devices and dancer-worn Bluetooth speakers. During the residency stay he will conduct workshops with Washington College music majors.
Nohe was the recipient of a 2006 Fulbright Senior Scholar Award from the Australian-American Fulbright Commission and an Australian-American Fulbright Commission Fulbright Alumni Initiative Grant in 2011. Five Maryland State Arts Council awards have supported his work, and he has also been recognized with a Creative Baltimore Award. In 2015 the Warnock Foundation recognized his interdisciplinary work in urban forests with a Social Innovator award.
Additional information about Voltage is Signal is available here.
]]>Michelle R. Scott, associate professor of history and Director of the Historical Studies Graduate Program, has received the 2017 Letitia Woods Brown Article Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians for her article, “These Ladies Do Business with a Capital B: The Griffin Sisters As Black Businesswomen in Early Vaudeville,” published in the Journal of African American History.
“Michelle Scott has done extensive research and beautifully written a compelling article to tell a story of black women in business which has been ignored,” says Sharon Harley, associate professor of African American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park and the chair of the Letitia Woods Brown Article Prize. “She has also taken it further by showing how the Griffin Sisters used vaudeville to fight for racial equality, which is an area not often associated with the movement.”
Scott had to sift through census information, obituaries, newspapers, and entertainment materials in independent archives across the country and the Library of Congress to weave and verify the Griffin sister journey. “I found the Griffin sisters in a footnote in a journal article while working on my current book about the Theatre Owner’s Booking Association circuit from the 1920s to 1931,” remembers Scott.
Emma and Mabel Griffin were famous for their acts as singers, comedians, and dancers between 1900 and 1918 in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Chicago. The sister act gained prominence as independent artists and businesswomen by becoming theatre owners, vaudeville circuit owners, and agents of their own entertainment contracts. They used their showmanship and business skills to fight for racial equality as labor organizers for the rights of black vaudeville artists. The Griffin Sisters created a template for future generations of black show business artists to gain control over their wages and art at a time when black women managers were unheard of.
“Emma and Mabel Griffin used the legal system, their celebrity, the fact that they were respected and beloved by black communities, and black newspapers to agitate for change in management, production, and racial equality,” said Scott. The article gained the attention of prominent historians of African American history on the board of the Letitia Woods Brown Prize who felt the article was worthy of acknowledgment.
Letitia Woods Brown was an African American researcher and historian who was the first black woman to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University in history and was the primary consultant for the Schlesinger Library’s Black Woman Oral History project. She personally donated the money for the book, anthology, and article awards.The accolade is personally significant for Scott who studies twentieth-century U.S. history, African American history, women’s history, black musical culture, and civil rights. “The Griffin sisters article was an opportunity for me to reveal the often forgotten women who did civil rights work. What does it mean when you study an event like WWII and you leave gender out, or even the construction of the 1960s Civil Rights Act and add the word ‘sex’ to it? The narrative changes and the full story must be told.”
This fall, the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (CADVC), celebrates the launch of four significant projects by research professor Maurice Berger, who through his curatorial work frequently explores issues of race, society, and culture, examining difficult subjects through the lens of art, photography, and visual media.
The new projects include the unveiling of exhibition websites for For All the World To See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights and Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television, the creation of a online home for Berger’s “Race Stories” essays, and the extension of a national tour of For All the World To See through the National Endowment for the Humanities’ On the Road program — all of which will broaden public access to this research.
“I have a lot of faith in visual media to communicate powerful and even life-changing ideas about this country,” says Berger, whose previous work includes exhibitions such as Notes in Time: Leon Golub and Nancy Spero (1995), Adrian Piper: A Retrospective (1999); Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations 1979–2000 (2002); White: Whiteness and Race in Contemporary Art (2003); For All the World To See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights (2012, photo above); and Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television (2016). Since 2012, Berger has contributed monthly “Race Stories” essays for the Lens Blog of The New York Times, exploring the relationship of race to photographic portrayals of race, and complementing many of the issues explored in his curatorial work.
The online version of the exhibition Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television, which toured nationally from 2015 to 2017 and was co-organized by CADVC and the Jewish Museum in New York, explores how modern art served as an influence and a model for shaping the new medium, from the 1940s to the 1970s. Visit the site here.
For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights, co-organized by CADVC and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, opened in 2010 and continues to travel in a smaller, lower-security version through the NEH on the Road initiative. The exhibition was the first to comprehensively explore the historic role of visual culture in shaping, influencing, and transforming the fight for racial equality and justice in the United States from the late-1940s to the mid-1970s. Visit the new online version of the critically acclaimed exhibition here.
“Websites are incredibly valuable teaching tools,” explains Berger on the importance of these new resources. “They reach more people than come in the door of the average museum. Most exhibitions actually have a relatively small audience. For All the World to See is the exception, which has had a million visitors and counting. That’s virtually unheard of. The typical art or visual culture exhibition, no matter how many venues, will probably reach no more than 100,000 visitors. A website is not bound by geography, or the fragility of art, or the enormous cost of shipping and maintaining an actual exhibition. Visitors can pop in from all over the world. Yes, there is nothing like experiencing real works of art or important examples of visual culture. But these online exhibitions augment the original exhibition in powerful ways, disseminating its ideas far and wide.”
The launch of the Race Stories webpage brings together in one convenient place links to Berger’s monthly “Race Stories” column, which explores the relationship of photography to concepts, themes, or social or regional issues around race not usually covered in the mainstream media. Visit the site here.
“I wanted to find ways to make the ‘Race Stories’ series available to as broad an audience as possible,” says Berger. “I think it’s important for college and university students to read these essays. So putting them on the CADVC website has made all of them available, in one convenient place, to our students at UMBC as well as the thousands of outside visitors to our website. I always write my essays for The New York Times and curate my exhibitions on race and visual culture with young people in mind. My ideal reader is a smart high school student — because if you can inspire a young person to see the world in new ways, then you can inspire anyone. I get a lot of emails from high school teachers and college professors, who tell me they routinely assign my ‘Race Stories’ essays to their students. I’m an educator, first and foremost. The principal purpose of my work is to teach racial literacy through visual culture.”
After a successful national tour, the exhibition For All the World To See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights received support from the On the Road program of the National Endowment for the Humanities, providing the opportunity for it to continue to tour the country in a reduced format. NEH on the Road is designed to create wider national access to the ideas, themes, and stories explored in major exhibitions funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Recently, the NEH extended its support of For All the World To See through 2023, the first time the endowment has doubled the national tour of an exhibition, allowing travel to an additional 47 geographically diverse national venues through 2023. Information on the NEH On the Road version of For All the World To See is available here.
This story was first published here and was written by Sarah Hansen.
This fall, hundreds of students from across the East Coast gathered to present their research and compete for awards at UMBC’s Undergraduate Research Symposium in the Chemical and Biological Sciences (URS). Fifty-two of the student scientists attend UMBC and participate in a program designed to provide research opportunities to a broad range of students in STEM and boost their confidence, increase the likelihood they pursue STEM graduate degrees, and set them on a path to success.
The program is UMBC STEM Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (BUILD). Eight BUILD students won awards, which is a good sign for the effectiveness of this relative newcomer among UMBC’s cohort programs. UMBC is one of 10 lead institutions on the STEM BUILD initiative nationwide and received $18 million from the National Institutes of Health to launch it in 2014 with the goal to “create a national model of comprehensive support to expand and increase the success of students in STEM.”
“The BUILD participants at URS exemplify the objectives of the program,” says Laura Ott, STEM BUILD active learning coordinator and director of UMBC’s Science Education Research Unit. All BUILD participants complete summer research, either in opportunities they arrange themselves or in small groups on campus organized by the program. BUILD students also receive financial support and extensive academic advising.
STEM BUILD is also a scientific study, so participants’ progress is carefully tracked to try to tease out which supports have the biggest impact on student success. “By participating in the BUILD program, they’re helping us explore novel strategies to increase participation in undergraduate research for all students,” Ott says.
Teodora (“Roxie”) Danaila ’20, biological sciences, Arjun Sharma ’20, biological sciences, and Amber Thompson ’20, biochemistry and molecular biology and mathematics, worked together to characterize antibiotic resistance genes present in local freshwater samples. Their team won second place in their biochemical and molecular biology group at URS. Mohammed Arafat ‘20, psychology; Yasmin Khan ‘20, biological sciences; and Sharanja Mathyvannan ‘20, pre-mechanical engineering, completed a similar project and won second place in their group.
Caitlin Kowalewski ’14, biological sciences, M.S. ’15, applied molecular biology, and now research coordinator for the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences; Josh Wilhide, M.S. ’10, chemistry, and manager of UMBC’s Molecular Characterization and Analysis Complex; and their assistants, Dave Varisco and Tim Cain ’18, chemistry education, mentored the students in the on-campus, three-week “Summer Bridge” experience.
“Ms. Kowalewski was able to get me to step my game up and allowed me to see what I was capable of,” Arafat shares. “If you ever had questions or were having trouble,” Danaila says, “they were there.” The mentors “allowed us to relay ideas back and forth with people who had much more experience and knowledge than us,” adds Sharma.
Presenting at the symposium had benefits, too. “It allowed me to explore fields of research that may interest me, and also helped me improve my presentation and research methods,” Sharma says. Thompson appreciated the opportunity to speak with students from other schools. “I was interested in how they got into their labs and what it was like for them in a different lab environment,” she shared.
“I felt that my role in mentoring the students was not only to teach them the laboratory skills, but to help them grow as scientists and researchers,” Kowalewski says. She was impressed by their rapid progress in the content-intensive program. “The fact that they were able to understand the information and present it well enough to win an award at URS was a testament to all of their hard work,” she says. Overall, the summer experience under Kowalewski’s tutelage is intended to build the students’ proficiency in a wide range of scientific techniques and prepare them for independent research opportunities.
Temiloluwa Okusolubo ’19, biological sciences, and Ifeoma (“Fefe”) Azinge ’19, biological sciences, are in their second year of BUILD participation and both earned first place in their biochemical and molecular biology groups at URS for independent research. Okusolubo studied the folding of serpin proteins, which are implicated in various diseases related to lung function, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Azinge’s research at the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore focused on calcium transport in sweat glands, which is critical for temperature regulation.
Okusolubo and Azinge’s successes are the kind of outcomes that UMBC STEM BUILD hopes to facilitate, using systems that other schools can eventually adopt. Ott is proud of the students in the program, she says, “and I have high hopes for where they’ll go in the future.”
]]>On November 16, Brian Carroll and Christiana Sasser ‘18, mechanical engineering, rose at 3:45 a.m. to drive to Lancaster, PA. After a briefing, they, a student from Millersville University, a pilot, and a technician took to the skies in a research airplane. Carroll, a student in the atmospheric physics Ph.D. program, had used detailed weather forecasting to meticulously plan the route to track a cold front passing through the area. Onboard instruments would collect data about how it affected the local air mass all along the way.
The plane chased the cold front across Atlantic City, NJ and then out over the ocean. But weather can be fickle, even with the best-laid plans.
“We never caught the cold front,” recalls Carroll. “We had to decide in the moment how we were going to salvage this and make it a decent research flight.” They did—the group instead focused their data collection on exploring differences in the planetary boundary layer (PBL) over water, the coastline, and farther inland. The PBL is the lowest layer of the atmosphere and can be anywhere from several hundred to 2,000 meters from Earth’s surface.
Carroll and Sasser’s flight was one of 14 student-led flights that occurred as part of a two-week, NSF-funded educational program led by Millersville University with UMBC, Penn State University, and Rutgers University as research partners and the University of Wyoming King Air aircraft and crew as hired support. Far from being a disaster, their flight met the initiative’s goal to provide experiential learning opportunities. It showed the group “how the science gets done in real life,” Carroll says. “It’s not an idealized problem of ‘Here’s this wonderful data set, you need to get something out of it.’ We needed to improvise with what was going on while we were in the air, and we now know about a lot of very real, small issues that we wouldn’t know about otherwise.”
The third UMBC student participant, atmospheric physics graduate student Zhifeng Yang, participated in a second UMBC-led flight with Carroll on November 11. Belay Demoz, director of UMBC’s Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology and professor of physics, and Zhibo Zhang, associate professor of physics, supported the students.
In all, 175 students participated in the program, which was intended to serve as a springboard for students’ research projects while giving them hands-on experience with the instruments and process required for in-flight data collection. The resulting data cache was immense: Instruments on the aircraft measured a few dozen variables every second for 40 total flight hours, in addition to data collected by 50 weather balloons and two ground stations. The instruments included two Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) systems (one pointing skyward and one toward Earth), sensors to detect gases such as methane and carbon dioxide, and tools to measure temperature, humidity, wind speed, and more.
Demoz, who encouraged his students to get involved with the project, would like to see a similar flight series happen in the future, closer to UMBC. “He’s always pushing students to get as much professional experience as they can,” says Carroll.
Carroll didn’t need the nudge, because “it’s possibly a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Even though aircraft are used often, it’s not often oriented in this give-everybody-a-turn sort of way.” Yang agrees. “It’s a very rare opportunity for us to observe the data in flight,” he says, “and now we know how to use a lot of the instruments that we didn’t know before.”
Carroll will use a similar type of aircraft to collect data for his doctoral research, “so knowing their capabilities and how to deal with them is definitely going to be valuable,” he says. Yang’s research seeks to improve weather forecasting models, so “we need observational data to evaluate the model, so we can adjust it to get better simulation results,” he says.
Both of them, however, have goals that go deeper than collecting, analyzing, and modeling data. “After I got introduced to this field, and when I realized that this work is very important for human health,” Yang says, “I wanted to do something to make this field better and better.” As for Carroll, “My long-term goals are to save the world and go into space,” he says. “If I enjoy doing math and science, which I do, then it’s good for me to put those skills to use toward helping the greater good and preserving the planet.”
This story was first published here and was written by Megan Hanks.
Cybersecurity is regularly a headliner in the news, especially when personal information stored online has been compromised, whether through a breach, hack, or threat. On Thursday, December 7, UMBC hosted experts from industry and academia at the National Press Club to discuss the cyber challenges professionals face, and how those groups can work together to prepare future generations of cybersecurity professionals.
Scott Shane, a reporter with The New York Times, led the discussion with five panelists representing industry, small business, and higher education. “I think it’s fair to say the internet was built without adequate attention to security,” stated Shane, who writes about cyber and information attacks regularly. “It’s almost like somebody who starts a bank with branches all over the world, and after it’s up and running and has millions of account holders, suddenly starts to think about safes, locks on the doors and bulletproof glass. I think that’s sort of the stage that we’re at right now.”
UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski and Anupam Joshi, professor and chair of computer science and electrical engineering, and director of the Center for Cybersecurity at UMBC, were joined by alumni and partners who have been working together on the urgent need to build the cybersecurity workforce. Hrabowski explained that there are currently about 350,000 unfilled cybersecurity jobs, and that number is expected to continue to grow. By 2021, it is anticipated that there will be approximately three million job openings in cyber-related fields.
Over the course of his professional career, Nigel Faulkner, chief technology officer at T. Rowe Price, has experienced the emergence of technology and many changes. “As the CTO of a medium-large company, cyber is a defensive investment for us. The best thing that can happen is nothing happens,” Faulkner said, adding that he is always thinking about whether the company is investing enough, doing the right thing, and making the right connections in the industry to keep clients’ information safe.
As president and founder of TCecure, LLC, and cybersecurity academic innovation officer for University System of Maryland (USM), Tina Williams ’02, computer science, shared the importance of building security into technology from the beginning, rather than adding these features on at the “tail end of a development cycle.” Not only does her company handle security, they also monitor threats and risks that can compromise the technology’s health. In her role at USM, Williams represents the system as a whole to integrate academia and academic research, relationships, and resources into what’s taking place nationally, at the Federally Funded Research and Development Centers.
As head of UMBC’s Center for Cybersecurity, Joshi explained that UMBC is combating these national challenges by partnering with industry and government leaders to conduct research that addresses specific real-world needs that benefit both. Collaborative relationships, such as UMBC’s work with Northrop Grumman and T. Rowe Price, is one way that UMBC is working to cultivate the next generation of cybersecurity talent.
As an alumna of UMBC and a current employee at Northrop Grumman, Lauren Mazzoli ’15, computer science and mathematics, M.S. ’17, computer science, a systems engineer in the Future Technical Leaders Program at Northrop Grumman, discussed her experience in the Cyber Scholars Program. The Cyber Scholars Program works to increase the participation of women and underrepresented minorities in the field. Mazzoli explained that her experience at UMBC, in the Cyber Scholars Program, and working alongside mentors on and off-campus led her to be involved with continuing to encourage women to pursue careers in cybersecurity. “For me it’s been a product of the relationship between academia and industry, that have allowed me to find my own career path, and at the same time help others find theirs,” she explained, noting her passion for helping students consider careers in cybersecurity and related fields.
“We know there’s a huge workforce that we need and we can’t fill that pipeline. So yes, we need more women, yes, we need students of all backgrounds, but we need diversity of thought, experience, education, and problem-solving skills,” said Mazzoli, adding that it is important for students to know from a young age that cybersecurity is a field they can pursue.
]]>UMBC’s Songon An is on a quest to explain how enzymes direct sugar metabolism through research with implications for cancer treatment. Scientists already know a great deal about how individual enzymes work in a test tube, but “once we move into the living cell system, we barely know about the enzymes,” says An, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry. With a new $1.5 million NIH grant, his lab is working to change that.
To explore how enzymes interact and form complex biochemical pathways in the body, An is using various biochemical and imaging techniques from biochemists and biophysicists. New, three-dimensional imaging techniques developed by Minjoung Kyoung, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry, will help examine the pathways at work inside living cells. A mathematical model developed by Hye-Won Kang, assistant professor of mathematics and statistics, supports the project.
The research focuses on two processes related to glucose metabolism: One produces energy for the cell to use, and the other generates compounds that assist in building the components of proteins and DNA, supporting the organism’s growth and repair. These two processes start out with the same first steps, and then diverge to generate different small molecules referred to as “metabolites.”
“What decides the direction of the pathway flux?” An is asking. His hypothesis, which his lab will test with the new grant, has to do with the physical arrangement of the enzymes in living cells. The enzymes that catalyze glucose metabolism physically group together, forming complexes that An has dubbed “glucosomes.” Each glucosome contains at least four critical enzymes, and the glucosomes further group together in the cell, forming glucosome clusters.
An hypothesizes that the enzymes present within the clusters and communication among the enzymes determines which metabolic process a given region in the cell favors at a given time. Interestingly, the size of the glucosome clusters also appears to play a role in determining which metabolic pathway dominates, and An intends to test that idea as well. Preliminary data suggest that single-enzyme concentrations (separate from the glucosomes) promote energy production, and multi-enzyme glucosome clusters favor churning out building blocks to grow the organism.
“Eventually, what I’d like to do, if technology allows, is to pinpoint individual clusters in the live cell, and put in some sort of probe to measure the level of the metabolites,” An says. “Then, if this hypothesis is correct, we will see different concentrations of metabolites in clusters of different sizes.”
Most imaging techniques only allow a researcher to detect where an enzyme is, not how much of a given metabolite a reaction is producing. An is hoping to use a more refined technique called secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) to examine cells’ metabolite concentrations. This technique has been successfully applied to detect lipids on the surface of cells, but never metabolites inside cells or related to glucose metabolism. In addition to incorporating Kyoung’s imaging expertise, An is collaborating with researchers outside UMBC who have experience with this challenging, new technique.
Beyond gaining a more complete understanding of the fundamental regulation of glucose metabolism, An seeks to contribute to cancer treatment. Preliminary data suggest that the largest glucosome clusters appear only in cancerous cells, and An is applying for another grant to further test that hypothesis. Patients who donated cancerous cells also donated healthy ones, so An’s team will be able to look for differences between them.
If An’s hypotheses are confirmed, the next challenge will be translating the new knowledge into a treatment that will break up the large clusters without interrupting the function of individual enzymes. “If small molecules inhibit the enzyme activity in diseased cells, they will inhibit the same enzymes in healthy ones as well,” An explains. “So what we’re trying to find is a small molecule that will simply dissociate the cancer-relevant large clusters, without inhibiting the enzyme activity.”
This new area of research is the reason An came to UMBC in 2011. “I’m hoping that in the future many people will be working in this area of cellular biochemistry, studying many metabolic enzymes in living cells,” and, eventually, “connecting the cellular level to the animal level, so we don’t have a scientific gap of understanding metabolism from a test tube to the human body,” he says.
By using fresh imaging techniques in new ways and employing mathematical modeling, An is moving past assumptions of what biochemistry can be, and he’s excited about the possible breakthroughs ahead. “We are opening up a new chapter for biochemistry in the cell,” he says. “This is the next stage of biochemistry.”