Beginning on Tuesday, May 26th, the Women's Center will operate with the following hours:

Monday through Thursday - 10am to 3pm

Fridays - Closed

In order to ensure access to this safe and private space for nursing parents, the Women's Center is partnering with the Commons CIC. If you plan on using the lactation room over the winter term, please contact Jess Myers (jessm@umbc.edu, 410-455-2714) for details and next steps. 

On behalf of the The Reach Initiative, the Women's Center is excited to share this opportunity!! Read on!

The Reach Initiative is a mentorship research program for high school women  who are interested in entering into the STEM fields. Our team is currently looking for a diverse range of majors and people to serve on our planning committees and mentors to work directly with our young women.

 The Reach Initiative is currently looking for women who are pursuing degrees in the STEM field or Environmental Science and who exhibit a passion and commitment to gender empowerment, the maths and sciences, and diversity. Mentors will volunteer Saturdays for 3 hours a week on campus with the possibility of receiving credit through the Honors College and/or Shriver Center.

Beginning on Tuesday, May 26th, the Women's Center will operate with the following hours:

Thank you to everyone who came out to the 10th Annual Wine Tasting and Silent Auction hosted by our Chapter of Young Alumni. By attending the event, you helped raise nearly $5,000 for student scholarships. We loved seeing you there and hope you had as much fun as we did! We’ve shared just a few photos from the event below, but we hope you’ll check out our full gallery on Flickr.

Potomac Photonics Expands NASA Technology to a Wide Range of Applications in Diverse Industries

By Potomac Photonics
Category: 3D Printing, Articles, Company, Industry

Potomac President Mike Adelstein shows NASA Administrator Charles Bolden micro parts fabricated at Potomac.

Potomac was recently honored to be included in NASA’s Technology Day on the Hill, an annual event that showcases the latest transformational technologies that have resulted from NASA funding.  In addition to one half-dozen congressional lawmakers and almost 300 Hill staffers, our President and CEO, Mike Adelstein, had the distinct pleasure of meeting NASA Director Charles Bolden. “It was great to meet Director Bolden,” Mike explained, “since so much of our company’s success is tied back to R&D funded by NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research {SBIR} program”.

The event is meant to demonstrate how companies in the private sector have used NASA grants and contracts to develop technologies to drive innovation of commercial products. NASA leadership and others were impressed by the wide range of industries that were impacted by our laser micromachining research NASA funded in the early 1990’s. Potomac’s high-resolution digital fabrication work has found technical solutions for medical devices, biotech, healthcare, microfluidics, energy, consumer products, sensors and microelectronics.

Potomac V.P. Mike Davis discusses Potomac’s technology on the Hill.

NASA Chief Technologist David Miller and Associate Administrator for Space Technology Steve Jurczyk were featured in the formal part of the April 29 program. With Mars exploration on the horizon, NASA is hoping to demonstrate to Congress that space exploration benefits humans back on earth. “Technology puts new tools in the tool boxes of engineers so they can design the missions we need,” Miller said. But as we have seen at Potomac, these same technologies are needed for next generation products, many of which are critical to healthcare and quality of life for patients.

Steve Jurczyk also talked about the importance of 3-D printing, a technology that Potomac now incorporates with laser micromachining. “3D printing is advancing very rapidly,” he said, and went on to describe the ability for colonizing humans to make many items they need on new planets such as Mars, rather than having to bring them along on the journey. The strategy not only saves shipping costs, it allows for print-on-demand of just the parts needed, when they are needed. Of course, 3D Printing is heavily used in the aerospace industry as its unique ability to create complex geometries is demonstrating high weight, and consequently fuel savings for aircraft.

We’re pleased that our home state’s Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) is among Congressional supporters of NASA. Hopefully, NASA Tech Day on the Hill demonstrated to our nation’s lawmakers the power of NASA not only in outer space, but also right here on Earth.

Words matter, perhaps more than you realize. How you describe something expresses your underlying attitude about it, but the words themselves reflect back at you, shaping your thoughts and actions and impacting your success. Alot of research has been done with athletes — they achieve better results when they talk to themselves with positive, motivational language.

But this wordplay goes beyond sports to everyday performance. One study published in Psychological Science revealed the effect a small turn of phrase can have. In the study, participants who were asked to write the words “Will I” during what they thought was an unrelated handwriting task did better later at problem-solving and were more motivated than those who wrote “I will.” So approaching a task with the mind-set of a question or challenge had a more positive impact than using a declaration.

The bottom line is that what you say and how you say it shapes what you do. As a nutritionist, I am especially keyed in to the words we use around food and nutrition, and I see many popularly hashtagged terms hurting more than they help when it comes to our health and well-being. Here are five words I’d like to see banished from the food conversation.

[Ask us Ellie food, recipe and nutrition questions here]

Detox

While it is true that certain foods help your body’s detoxification systems do their critical work, the word “detox” mostly feeds the alarmist notion that our bodies regularly accumulate piles of harmful compounds and we have to do something about it fast. The treatment usually involves a special (and typically expensive) concoction or radical eating plan. In this way “detox” sets us up for a fear-oriented and extremist mind-set, where we think that we need something more advanced than regular healthful food to thrive and that some magic bullet can quickly erase the effects of partying, overindulging and generally not taking care of ourselves.

So scrap that word and strive for a balanced way of life that optimizes your liver, lungs and immune system, which thankfully are very good at consistently preventing toxins from building up. Eat plenty of vegetables and whole fruits, get enough sleep, exercise and water, and take it easy on alcohol. If you go off the rails one night or over the course of a weekend, you don’t have to do anything dramatic to repent. Just go back to normal the next day.

By Ellie Krieger

The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) seeks an enthusiastic and experienced Sales Associate to play an essential role in the success and operation of The BMA Shop. The ideal candidate will aid in maximizing revenues while acting as an ambassador for the institution using their excellent communication and customer service skills, and product management.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Responsibilities include: