For Manil Suri, Math + Fiction + Ambition = A Career > The Sum of Its Parts

by Mark Athitakis

Last October, UMBC professor of mathematics Manil Suri planned to end a session of his Introduction to Numerical Analysis class with a short video presentation he had created called Pride and Prejudice on the Complex Plane.

The class is a 400-level course on complex matters like fixed-point iteration, Taylor series, and the mean value theorem. But Pride and Prejudice on the Complex Plane is breezy six-minute PowerPoint riff on imaginary numbers (such as the square root of -2). The presentation is styled as a pro-diversity PSA that cautions, in a tongue-in-cheek way, the barbarians who think imaginary and real numbers ought to exist in separate spheres. (The opening slides say the video is presented by “The Coalition for Digital Dignity” and the “Numerical Rights Campaign Fund.”)

Suri intends to include Pride and Prejudice, and other animations like it, in an interactive novel he’s writing. “I’ve been working on this for a long time now, trying to come up with a book for non-mathematicians on math,” he says. He adds, though it goes without saying: “It’s very difficult.”

A good storyteller might be able to pull it off, and Suri is a widely acclaimed one. The Death of Vishnu, his 2001 debut novel, was a moving chronicle of the day in the life of the residents of a Mumbai apartment building. The book earned a PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, given annually to the best first works of American fiction, and it was a finalist for the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award. His follow-up novel, 2007’s The Age of Shiva, was a more expansive work about Suri’s native India after partition; it became a bestseller that the New Yorker (the first place his fiction appeared) called “a sensuous, nuanced portrait of motherhood.”

Suri has taught math at UMBC since 1983, and his CV is rich with accomplishments in that field as well. So in recent years he’s attempted to merge his dual passions in presentations, in papers, in coursework, and in videos like Pride and Prejudice on the Complex Plane. But it’s a struggle.

“I feel like I’ve got a platform in some sense, afforded by whatever success I’ve had as an author – people might say, ‘I’ve read a book by him, let me try this,’” observes Suri. “The only problem with that is, now that this is going to be a novel, I keep fighting. How much math should be in there? Is this really necessary for the story?… Even these videos, I have to look at them really carefully. Are they really stories, or am I just giving a math lecture? The second is not going to be as popular.”

That day in Introduction to Numerical Analysis, Suri had precisely the opposite problem. The 20 students in the room came ready with a host of questions in advance of a test, and there was no time for the video. You have to wonder, as Suri does: What’s the best way for math and storytelling to get along?

UNDER WRAPS

As it happens, there’s a bit of math in Suri’s third novel, The City of Devi, which is set in the near future and centers on Sarita, who loses track of her fiancé when a series of apocalyptic events – cyberattacks, blackouts, religious riots – strikes Mumbai. Sarita is a statistician whose beloved, Karun, was an anxious lover, and her diary entries assign star ratings to the couple’s early bedroom interactions. “Our performance had a weekly mean of 4.35 stars over the past five months or so, with a standard deviation of 2.72,” Suri writes.

It’s not Nabokov, but it’s not meant to be: The City of Devi is a broader and (despite its opening calamities) funnier novel than its predecessors, exploring hive mentalities, conventional wisdom about relationships, and cults of personality. That its heroine is a statistician – and not a mathematician, as Suri kept reminding his publisher – was a complicated decision. “I agonized over that, because you find so few statisticians in literature, or math-type people,” he says.

Indeed, the shelf of books of math-related fiction, or books by mathematically trained fiction writers, is a short one. Alice in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll taught math at Oxford. Edwin Abbott’s 1884 novel Flatland leveraged geometry to satirize Victorian society. Mark Haddon and Richard Powers have integrated math-based puzzles into their work. David Foster Wallace wrote a book on infinity, 2003’s Everything and More, though many mathematicians found his analytical chops wanting. (“I think he was just showing off too much,” Suri says.)

For a long time, Suri was conflicted about joining those ranks. When he began writing fiction in earnest in the mid-’90s, he kept it a secret among his academic colleagues. As he was finishing The Death of Vishnu, he was collaborating with Panos G. Charalambides, a professor in UMBC’s department of mechanical engineering, on methods to analyze materials called “woven composites” for stress and distortion. Suri’s collaborations with other researchers on analysis of structures and materials have been widely cited and have been used in software tools, but Charalambides says that he hadn’t the slightest idea about Suri’s novel as they worked together.

“Once I learned, I was tickled pink,” Charalambides says. “Often enough, scientists are unitary. There’s a stereotype that they don’t have other interests. And clearly Suri has tremendous interests.”

Tremendous interests can be tricky in the sciences, though, and the pervasiveness of that stereotype prompted Suri to keep quiet about his sideline. Early in his teaching career he was told that great mathematicians focus exclusively on math; he once heard a speaker dismissed by colleagues for being a good bridge player. “That made me realize that if I’m doing this writing, maybe it’s a good idea to keep it under wraps, at least until I get tenure,” he says.

By the time he received tenure in 1989, not talking about his fiction had become a habit. And besides, a fiction writer’s path to success is hard to explain. Suri describes his own experience as pure luck: He had the support of writing teachers like Richard McCann, Michael Cunningham, and Vikram Chandra, and a writing retreat at the MacDowell Colony introduced him to an agent and publisher who admired and supported The Death of Vishnu.

“Anywhere along the way, if that chain had broken, it could have been a long time before I’d be able to get to that stage,” observes Suri.

UNCOMMON GROUND

In the fall of 2011, Suri collaborated with Michele Osherow, an associate professor in the Department of English, to teach a freshman humanities seminar at UMBC. Osherow is also resident dramaturg at the Folger Theatre in Washington, DC, and she first worked with Suri in 2009, when she asked him to help her and the actors understand the math in a production of Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia. She recalls, however, that she was initially intimidated about approaching him to consult on the play. “Maybe it’s something about the way our culture now and historically represents mathematicians as these brilliant but crazy people,” Osherow says.

The course they taught together (“Mathematics and What It Means to Be Human”) addressed some of those stereotypes as they emerged in movies like Good Will Hunting and Pi. Their syllabus strived to connect their disciplines: King Lear allowed the class to discuss zero as a concept; the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges was an avenue for students to ponder infinity.

But common ground eluded the two professors. In a three-part series published last fall in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the tandem described how often they split philosophically. “We sort of found a groove, but it took us a while to realize that we were never actually going to see things in the same way,” Osherow says. “Instead of trying to solve that problem, there came a point where we just sort of cherished it.”

For instance, Suri was frustrated with the way poets like Archibald MacLeish and J.V. Cunningham would casually – and, to his mind, imprecisely – use mathematical terms in their work. “We would argue about what precision was, and the word precise,” Osherow says. “We would argue about the purpose of poetry.”

Suri stresses that he enjoyed the experience, and embraced the loggerheads at which he and Osherow often found themselves. But he also understood how students were frustrated with a seminar that couldn’t cleanly connect math and literature. “We all like to learn things we already know or are comfortable with,” he says. “So what happens with these classes is that the expectations are much harder to pin down.”

It may be that the connection is impossible, an oil-and-water proposition. In the 1920s, Soviet scholar Vladimir Propp identified the structural elements of folklore and fairy tales, and in the ’60s, a French group of writers championed Oulipo, a method that applies rigorous constraints on creative writing. Suri has found such devices useless in his own fiction, though. When he first began work on The City of Devi in 2001, he devised a series of decision trees for his characters, but “the only solutions were the most trite things you can think of,” he says, adding a joke: “I was actually quite happy because I found a mathematical proof that this novel could not be written.” Nearly a decade later, such schemes abandoned, he found a way back in.

But if Suri can’t quite blend math and fiction, he also can’t pursue only one of his two main interests. When he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004, he took a year off to work at home on his next novel. (He lives in Silver Spring with his partner, Larry Cole.) But he missed teaching. “When I used to be a student, and when I was beginning faculty member, I always felt that there was a gap I had to fill with creative writing or something else,” he says. “And now when I was spending all that time doing creative work, it was more like I need to do something completely logical and mathematical. There was that gap that needed to be filled.”

FINDING A SOLUTION

Pride and Prejudice on the Complex Plane is one of two videos Suri has sketched out so far for his e-book project. A second, The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Fraction, is a seriocomic take on irrational numbers like pi and e. The star of that presentation is a woman who can make herself into any integer-based fraction yet who dreams of being the square root of two. Her “journey of self-discovery” leads to the “terrible surprise” that there’s no way to render the square root of two as a clear, integer-based fraction.

Suri concludes the tale thusly: “Petra assumed forms that brought her closer and closer to her beloved, and with each step she took, with each digit she added, Petra shed another bitter tear.”

So are Suri’s Pride and Prejudice and Petra Von Fraction stories? Clever teaching aids? The first steps of the Proppian folktale morphology? Anthropomorphizing numbers, even irrational ones, has a way of being unsatisfying in the traditional literary sense. Suri recognizes that it’s not there yet, but he’s persistent. “I need to somehow make this work,” he says. “Somehow there’s an opportunity there, which can be synergistic in some way.”

Suri recently shared his PowerPoints with Lee Boot, associate director of UMBC’s Imaging Research Center. The two men had worked together on an iPad app the math department has been developing for middle-school students. Boot was struck by how far Suri had gotten on his own. “He’s getting more animation out of PowerPoint than most people would even know is in the program,” he says.

But Boot (who’s also an award-winning filmmaker) recognizes the narrative problem inherent in Suri’s effort. An e-book novel that blends conventional narrative with interstitial animations on mathematical concepts is, well, novel, and that sort of “novel” is a challenge. “People reject things just because they’re new,” Boot says. “That’s in fact a huge reason why innovative things struggle. We need to think of ourselves as innovation-seeking, and creativity-seeking, but the opposite is true.”

In the meantime, Suri is pondering a more conventional work of fiction as a follow-up to The City of Devi. This one would connect his three previous books in one unifying narrative. He’s set himself a tough task in this as well, because while Suri’s three novels share a setting and themes, the characters in each book are quite distinct.

How to resolve that problem? He wrote a mathematical paper on it.

Suri presented “On the Geometry of Metafiction” at Bridges 2012, a conference on cross-disciplinary work in the arts and mathematics sponsored by the American Mathematical Society. Sketching out how the structure of the fourth book would require a 3-D, metafictional structure, not a traditionally linear 2-D one, the four-page paper explains how the work in progress “incorporates not only the stories represented by Books 1-3, but also an observer who can look down on these stories (for purposes of commentary, interpretation, and so on).”

Suri smiles as he ponders his fourth novel-to-be. “I have the perfect title for it,” he says, amused by its paradox and its elegant merger of theory and art:

“The Trinity Quartet.”

Read more about Manil Suri’s new book, The City of Devi, and mathematics at his website. Read more…

FROM: Freeman Hrabowski, President, and Philip Rous, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs
TO: The UMBC Community
RE: Inaugural Grants from the Hrabowski Fund for Innovation

We are delighted to announce the projects receiving inaugural grants from this fund. These projects build on our faculty’s strong track record of, and commitment to, reimagining what it means to teach and learn. We received a large number of outstanding applications and, unfortunately, could not fund all of the projects. Those selected for awards represent each of our colleges and a wide range of disciplines, and many of them take an interdisciplinary approach to their work.

IMPLEMENTATION AND RESEARCH GRANTS

The Math Gym – A team led by Nagaraj Neerchal, professor and chair of mathematics and statistics, will develop The Math Gym, which will feature “conditioning coaches” and “personal trainers” who will help students keep their foundational math skills in good working order. Moreover, the gym will promote healthy math habits among all our students, drawing a clear analogy between the regular work outs and conditioning needed to maintain both athletic and mathematical skill.

Active Computing Teaching and InnoVation Environment – A team led by Marie desJardins, professor of computer science and electrical engineering, will create ACTIVE, a dynamic “laptop laboratory.” The lab will support innovation in computing courses – with a particular focus on improving the retention and success of women, underrepresented minorities and transfer students. The laboratory will extend active-learning environments, such as CASTLE and the new English writing labs, to a new area of the university.

SEED GRANTS

The Wisdom Institute – A team led by Craig Saper, professor and director of UMBC’s language, literacy, and culture program, will create an institute to expand the role for emeritus professors at UMBC.

Putting Students’ Language Skills to Work – A team led by Susanne Sutton, lecturer in modern languages, linguistics, and intercultural communication, will develop new experiential and service-learning course requirements for undergraduates studying German, with a particular focus on connecting students to Baltimore’s German community.

Service-Learning in Statics – A team led by Anne Spence, professor of the practice in mechanical engineering, will develop new service-learning requirements for undergraduates studying mechanical engineering, with a particular focus on identifying components that increase retention and student success.

EHS – Bruce Walz, professor and chair of emergency health services, will lead a project to integrate individual cameras into EHS exercises, so that students can receive more personalized and immediate feedback on their performance.

Begun with major grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Heinz Awards, the Innovation Fund has benefited from substantial support from alumni and friends, the local community and businesses, and State and national leaders. That support is a testament to the work we’ve already done and a vote of confidence for the national model we’re continuing to build. Projects supported by the Innovation Fund will complement the many other creative and enterprising initiatives already underway at UMBC – from the STEM Transfer Student Success Initiative to composition course redesign in English – and will build on our strong history of finding novel approaches to teaching and scholarship.

The competition for the next round of Innovation Fund grants is underway, with proposals due by Friday, February 8. For more information on how to apply, click here. We want to thank everyone who has submitted a proposal, and encourage those whose proposals could not be funded in the first round to apply again.

We are truly inspired by the creative ideas we hear each day and are delighted to be able to support more of them through this fund.

In her opening remarks at the Oregon Higher Education Sustainability Conference (OHESC) at Portland State University, Institute for Sustainable Solutions Director Jennifer Allen encouraged attendees to think of ways to “link arms and harness our assets together in a way that we can really move the needle on [sustainability efforts].”

With public-private partnerships that promote urban mobility, the integration of energy and sustainable design, ecosystem services work and watershed stewardship, collaboration is the hallmark of Portland State’s Institute for Sustainable Solutions, which is charged with advancing sustainability research, education and outreach at the university.

A higher education sustainability conference in this region provides a unique look at partnerships that exist among public and private sectors that would normally compete with each other. For a full list of speakers and presentations, see the conference program. Slides from each presentation will be posted by the end of February.

Portland-based AASHE staff members Margo Wagner (marketing & communications) and Judy Walton (publications) attended the January 31-February 1 event, recording their takeaways on the theme of collaboration:

1. Music Provides Common Ground Across Cultural Divides in Sustainability

Portland State University professor Albert Spencer, an Eastern Kentucky native and “proud grandson of a coal miner” is working to create curriculum that will encourage sustainable energy careers in Appalachia. His approach? Bluegrass music.

When it comes to conversations about energy, there is a large cultural divide between Spencer’s urban, middle-class, environmentally-focused, liberal Portland students and the rural, working poor, conservative demographic of Appalachia. “But both places loves bluegrass!” exclaimed Spencer during his session, “Using Bluegrass Music to Power Sustainable Energy in Appalachia.”

By studying Steve Earl’s “The Mountain” and Taylor Made’s “West Virginia Underground”—“beer drinkin’, butt-kickin’ music,” as Spencer calls it—PSU students gained a different perspective and empathy for how Appalachians feel about outsiders telling them how to live and what’s “right.” Spencer hopes to take the course online for students in Appalachia to help achieve his ultimate goal of slowing the capital flight from the region.

2. Finding Common ‘Sustainability’ Language is Key to the Movement

Nichole Martin didn’t like the word “sustainability.” She felt excluded from the conversation and wondered how, as a woman of color, she fit into “this big movement about how we can sustain” that seemed full of messages about eating organic food, recycling, shopping locally and other language targeted to white people of privilege.

After talking with her parents, she realized her own connection with the word: “My parents have been sustaining for a long time. It’s called trying to survive.”

During the conference, Martin shared her experience of inviting people of color into the sustainability conversation through a series of seminars on the Portland State campus focused on race and sustainability. The goal of the series, which ended up being hugely popular, was to find common language that could lead to communities finding their own ways to get involved with the movement.

The common sustainability definition to come out of the series: “A person’s capacity to continue.”

“Exploring the social side of sustainability changed my life,” said Martin, who now serves as a program assistant for Portland State University’s Solutions Generator, which works to “inspire students as change agent leaders capable of envisioning, implementing and assessing holistic sustainability solutions on campus and in the community.”

3. Sustainability Industry Partnerships Keep Institutions Competitive

The energy efficiency industry is expanding with a national investment of $1.5 billion per year and Oregon is attracting graduates as a national/global center of excellence for energy efficiency and design, said Energy Trust of Oregon’s Fred Gordon during the session, “Energy Efficiency: Powerful Creator of Green Jobs for Professionals.”

This all sounds good but there is a current disconnect between this growing industry and Oregon’s state universities. “Here’s an industry that is a big part of the climate change solution, a space that is tailor made for PSU—we have a stake in the ground around urban sustainability—and we’re not able to meet the demand for jobs in this industry,” said session panelist Erin Flynn, associate vice president for strategic partnerships at Portland State.

In terms of national education and training, said Flynn, there are lots of technical programs at two-year colleges in the energy efficiency industry, but there is an opportunity right now to pioneer curriculum that will prepare economists, business managers and specialists in this field.

Portland State currently offers a popular smart grid course and a green building lab, and is now working to weave these disparate pieces into “something meaningful for students and industry,” said Flynn. “…the demand is clear, the industry is ready, and it seems like the kind of opportunity to be intentional about, to jump on.”

As a punctuation to this message, luncheon keynote speaker David Kenney, president and executive director of Oregon BEST (Built Environment & Sustainable Technologies Center), showed how connecting Oregon industry to university research teams adds value and enhances competitiveness for Oregon firms, boosts state revenues, helps the state recruit new clean technology companies, and grows and improves university research. Oregon BEST, a nonprofit established by the Oregon Legislature, invests in key clean tech research projects and facilities that can create economic impact and attract research dollars to Oregon universities. Kenney opened and concluded his talk with these words: "Some of you, perhaps not all, should become clean tech inventors, innovators or entrepreneurs. We need you."

4. Collaboration Helps Impact the Campus (Triple) Bottom Line

At Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon, a collaborative effort is transforming the campus into a "living lab." With support from President Mary Spilde, faculty, staff and students are working together on projects that benefit the campus while enhancing student learning and faculty/staff research. The college's new Institute for Sustainable Practices helps connect courses (Lane CC has six sustainability-focused degree programs) with campus facilities and infrastructure spaces that become real-world "labs." Energy management and water conservation instructors Josh Manders and Sarah Whitney described three levels of student involvement with these spaces from simple tours, to data collection and monitoring projects, to analysis of "real problems with real equipment," which generates "real solutions." Mike Sims, recycling and surplus property coordinator and Anna Scott, energy analyst, described how these collaborative projects "provide students with opportunities to impact the campus (triple) bottom line."

5. Collaboration is Integral to the Student Vision of Sustainability

Developed by students from across higher education institutions in the Northwest during the conference, the OHESC Student Summit Vision includes "expectations of inclusive and collaborative decision making processes, which include students, faculty, staff, administrators, alumni, and the surrounding communities" as part of its definition of a "culture of sustainability." Tangible actions toward a culture of sustainability as outlined in the Vision include:

• a commitment to transparent endowments, socially responsible investments, and a complete divestment from fossil fuels
• establishing a Green Revolving Fund on each campus
• developing a requirement in each major that addresses the intersection of sustainability and the field of study
• creating a system for access to affordable, healthy, and just food, which could include establishing a food pantry and/or garden plots for the campus community’s use
• mandating programs that provide a holistic introduction to sustainability for first year students, new staff, faculty and administrators, which address oppression of both people and the planet

Click here for a full look at the OHESC Student Summit Vision.

This month, we are sponsoring two Saturday seminars on February, 23, 2012, on UMBC’s Campus, Public Policy Building, Room 206.

________________________________________________________

Breakfast Seminar: 

“Completing Your Master’s Thesis or Doctoral Dissertation”

Speaker: Dr. Wendy Carter-Veale (PROMISE Dissertation Coach, The Dissertation House)

10AM -12 Noon

RSVP: UMBC’s graduate students are asked to RSVP on MyUMBC here: http://my.umbc.edu/groups/promise/events/16380

Students from other campuses are asked to RSVP as a comment for this post.

Join the blog for The Dissertation House today! http://dissertationhouse.wordpress.com/blog-online-challenge/winter-2013-challenge/.  Any student from any school may join.

These are free activities.

———————————————

Lunch Seminar:

“Radio Research” with Barrett Whitener (Professional Voice-over artist, PROMISE Public Speaking Facilitator)
Barrett Whitener returns once again to work with graduate students on public peaking skills. In this seminar, you will learn how to give a synopsis of your work to an audience, WITHOUT a powerpoint presentation. You will be coached to present your work to an audience as if you were being interviewed on the radio.  This seminar debuted at one of the first PROMISE Summer Success Institutes at the Sheraton Hotel in Columbia. It was very popular, and we are able to bring it back this year. Whitener conducted our “Confident Public Speaking” seminar in 2012. Graduate students from all disciplines are invited to attend this Feb. 23, 2013 Special Saturday Success Seminar.  UMBC’s graduate students are asked to RSVP on MyUMBC here:

http://my.umbc.edu/groups/promise/events/16381

We’re also co-sponsoring:

“Not Just the Tenure Track” with UMBC’s Graduate Student Chapter of Women in Science and Engineering (WISE-Grads), Thursday, Feb. 7, 2013, 4:30 PM, UMBC AOK Library, 7th Floor.

This month, we are sponsoring two Saturday seminars on February, 23, 2012, on UMBC’s Campus, Public Policy Building, Room 206.

________________________________________________________

Breakfast Seminar: 

“Completing Your Master’s Thesis or Doctoral Dissertation”

Speaker: Dr. Wendy Carter-Veale (PROMISE Dissertation Coach, The Dissertation House)

10AM -12 Noon

RSVP: UMBC’s graduate students are asked to RSVP on MyUMBC here: http://my.umbc.edu/groups/promise/events/16380

Students from other campuses are asked to RSVP as a comment for this post.

Join the blog for The Dissertation House today! http://dissertationhouse.wordpress.com/blog-online-challenge/winter-2013-challenge/.  Any student from any school may join.

These are free activities.

———————————————

Lunch Seminar:

“Radio Research” with Barrett Whitener (Professional Voice-over artist, PROMISE Public Speaking Facilitator)
Barrett Whitener returns once again to work with graduate students on public peaking skills. In this seminar, you will learn how to give a synopsis of your work to an audience, WITHOUT a powerpoint presentation. You will be coached to present your work to an audience as if you were being interviewed on the radio.  This seminar debuted at one of the first PROMISE Summer Success Institutes at the Sheraton Hotel in Columbia. It was very popular, and we are able to bring it back this year. Whitener conducted our “Confident Public Speaking” seminar in 2012. Graduate students from all disciplines are invited to attend this Feb. 23, 2013 Special Saturday Success Seminar.  UMBC’s graduate students are asked to RSVP on MyUMBC here:

http://my.umbc.edu/groups/promise/events/16381

We’re also co-sponsoring:

“Not Just the Tenure Track” with UMBC’s Graduate Student Chapter of Women in Science and Engineering (WISE-Grads), Thursday, Feb. 7, 2013, 4:30 PM, UMBC AOK Library, 7th Floor.

FROM: Freeman Hrabowski, President, and Philip Rous, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs
TO: The UMBC Community
RE: Inaugural Grants from the Hrabowski Fund for Innovation

We are delighted to announce the projects receiving inaugural grants from this fund. These projects build on our faculty’s strong track record of, and commitment to, reimagining what it means to teach and learn. We received a large number of outstanding applications and, unfortunately, could not fund all of the projects. Those selected for awards represent each of our colleges and a wide range of disciplines, and many of them take an interdisciplinary approach to their work.

IMPLEMENTATION AND RESEARCH GRANTS

The Math Gym – A team led by Nagaraj Neerchal, professor and chair of mathematics and statistics, will develop The Math Gym, which will feature “conditioning coaches” and “personal trainers” who will help students keep their foundational math skills in good working order. Moreover, the gym will promote healthy math habits among all our students, drawing a clear analogy between the regular work outs and conditioning needed to maintain both athletic and mathematical skill.

Active Computing Teaching and InnoVation Environment – A team led by Marie desJardins, professor of computer science and electrical engineering, will create ACTIVE, a dynamic “laptop laboratory.” The lab will support innovation in computing courses – with a particular focus on improving the retention and success of women, underrepresented minorities and transfer students. The laboratory will extend active-learning environments, such as CASTLE and the new English writing labs, to a new area of the university.

SEED GRANTS

The Wisdom Institute – A team led by Craig Saper, professor and director of UMBC’s language, literacy, and culture program, will create an institute to expand the role for emeritus professors at UMBC.

Putting Students’ Language Skills to Work – A team led by Susanne Sutton, lecturer in modern languages, linguistics, and intercultural communication, will develop new experiential and service-learning course requirements for undergraduates studying German, with a particular focus on connecting students to Baltimore’s German community.

Service-Learning in Statics – A team led by Anne Spence, professor of the practice in mechanical engineering, will develop new service-learning requirements for undergraduates studying mechanical engineering, with a particular focus on identifying components that increase retention and student success.

EHS – Bruce Walz, professor and chair of emergency health services, will lead a project to integrate individual cameras into EHS exercises, so that students can receive more personalized and immediate feedback on their performance.

Begun with major grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Heinz Awards, the Innovation Fund has benefited from substantial support from alumni and friends, the local community and businesses, and State and national leaders. That support is a testament to the work we’ve already done and a vote of confidence for the national model we’re continuing to build. Projects supported by the Innovation Fund will complement the many other creative and enterprising initiatives already underway at UMBC – from the STEM Transfer Student Success Initiative to composition course redesign in English – and will build on our strong history of finding novel approaches to teaching and scholarship.

The competition for the next round of Innovation Fund grants is underway, with proposals due by Friday, February 8. For more information on how to apply, click here. We want to thank everyone who has submitted a proposal, and encourage those whose proposals could not be funded in the first round to apply again.

We are truly inspired by the creative ideas we hear each day and are delighted to be able to support more of them through this fund.