Dear Retrievers and Valued Riders,

This is a friendly reminder that UMBC Transit will be closed tomorrow Thursday, November 28th, and Friday, November 29th, in observance of the Thanksgiving holiday. We will operate on an interim schedule on Saturday, November 30th, and Sunday, December 1st.

For your convenience, here are some alternative transit options available while UMBC Transit is closed:

1. Baltimore Link
   • Route 32: UMBC - Patapsco
   • LocalLink 76: CCBC - Downtown
   • LocalLink 37: Old Court Metro to UMBC
   • CityLink PURPLE: Paradise/Catonsville
2. RideShare Services
   • Lyft
   • Uber

For assistance during regular operating hours, please feel free to contact us at 410.455.2454 or transit@umbc.edu.

Thank you, and we wish you a safe and happy holiday!

Safe Travels,

Your Transit Team ~ Driving Student Success

UMBC chemical engineering students excelled again at the annual meeting of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), held in San Diego this fall. The UMBC ChemE Jeopardy team, led by senior chemical engineering student Colin Jones, claimed third place at the national competition held during the conference; the K – 12 STEM outreach team, led by senior chemical engineering student Jemma Pryzbocki, won the top judges’ award in the high school category for designing a module to teach concepts of heat exchange; and the UMBC AIChE club won a best student chapter award.

The UMBC ChemE car team, which designed a car that starts and stops by chemical reactions, also performed respectably in a competitive field. The team was led by senior chemical engineering student Ben Welling. Several students also received individual recognitions—senior chemical engineering and biochemistry student Pavan Umashankar won a Donald F. & Mildred Topp Othmer Scholarship Award and senior Meredith Morse, chemical engineering, took third place in the student poster session in the food, pharmaceutical, and biotechnology division.

“The students deserve a big round of applause for all their dedication and hard work,” says Neha Raikar, a senior lecturer in the Department of Chemical, Biochemical, and Environmental Engineering (CBEE) and one of the advisors to the student AIChE chapter. 

“The chemical engineering major demands exceptional attention to detail and hard work,” says Mariajosé Castellanos, another CBEE faculty who advises the AIChE chapter. “It is truly inspiring to see our students consistently apply their skills and make a lasting mark on the national stage!”

UMBC students have achieved impressive AIChE conference success for many years running. The ChemE Jeopardy team has reached the final every year since 2020, and the K – 12 STEM outreach team, which only began competing last year, has won awards at each event. Earlier this year, the UMBC student chapter showed off their growth and talents by hosting a regional meeting of AIChE for the first time.

We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Swathi Penumutchu, a former UMBC Meyerhoff and LSAMP Scholar, currently a postdoctoral researcher at MIT. Dr. Penumutchu, who earned her PhD in Pathobiology at Brown University, will share her journey, advice, and insights on pursuing a career in bioinformatics and beyond!

Date: Today

Time: 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Where: Virtual Only on Webex

Webex Link: https://umbc.webex.com/umbc/j.php?MTID=m70ba429f2189e1c67099c7f12c2fba14

Tolulope Ale and Maloy Kumar Devanth have been officially admitted to the Candidacy . On November 1, 2024, Tolulope Ale had the opportunity to participate in the time honored tradition of the UMBC Candidacy Ceremony marking a crucial milestone in the PhD journey. While unable to attend the ceremony, Maloy Kumar Devanth was out of town presenting his PhD research at the SIGSPATIAL 2024.

Please join us in congratulating Tolulope and Maloy on achieving this monumental milestone!

To expand research capabilities, iHARP hosted a High Performance Computing (HPC)  Bootcamp on November 12, 2024 led by iHARP Research Assistant Sai Vikas Amaraneni with support from DoIT members Roy Prouty, Philip Henry, Beamlak Bekele, and Max Breitmeyer. 

iHARP and UMCES CGC-SCIPE researchers were introduced to UMBC’s HPC resources and gained hands-on training in the Ada High-Performance Computing (HPC) cluster. The bootcamp introduced fundamental concepts in Ada such as BASH basics, and environment setup for efficient research workflows, as well as managing jobs with SLURM. Attendees used a case study involving Patch-CNN for predicting sea ice extent in the Antarctic region (research project being presented at AGU this year), in order to understand the role of HPC in research boththrough single GPU and Multi-GPU training.

We would like to thank Sai Vikas Amaraneni and DoIT members Roy Prouty, Philip Henry, Beamlak Bekele, and Max Breitmeyer for their support and dedication to furthering research capabilities in iHARP and UMCES.

Good morning everyone!