Hello Retrievers!

I am Dr. Jake Diaz, UMBC’s new Assistant Vice President and Dean of Students. My family and I moved to Baltimore in June, and I could not be more excited to welcome you to campus for the start of the academic year!

My team and I are here to ensure you feel supported, included, and empowered throughout your journey at UMBC. We operate on the foundational belief that every student belongs here, and we aim to provide a community filled with opportunities and resources to help you thrive.

Here are a few key ways to jump right into campus life and find your support system this semester:

Get Connected and Get Involved

• Welcome, Retrievers! I’m thrilled to experience my very first Welcome, Retrievers, Please stop by and say hello to me and our team at upcoming events!

• Involvement Fest: With over 250 graduate and undergraduate student organizations at UMBC, this is the best spot to meet student leaders, find your crew, and grab some free goodies.

• Events Calendar: Keep an eye on the calendar to stay in the loop on activities happening all year long.

Set Yourself Up for Academic Success

Navigating university-level coursework is a team effort. Take advantage of campus learning resources early in the semester:

• Academic Success Center: The central hub for peer tutoring, Supplemental Instruction (SI), and academic coaching to help undergraduates build strong study skills.

• Academic Advising Center: Helps undergraduates stay on track with degree requirements, course selection, and academic planning.

• PROMISE: Helps graduate students build academic skills, social supports, and career networks. 

• The Writing Center: Offers all students one-on-one assistance with writing assignments at any stage of the drafting process.

• Graduate Student Association Writing Advisor: Assists graduate students with any writing project/assignment across all curricula. 

• Faculty office hours: Make it a goal to connect with your professors! Using office hours early and often is one of the best ways to get the most out of your classes.

Resources devoted to your success and wellbeing

Navigating college life isn't always easy, and we encourage you to ask for help when you need it. Please connect with your faculty and with us as staff. Our campus network is here to support you:

• Retriever CARE: Offers personalized care coordination, support for students in distress, resource referrals, and ongoing advocacy.

• Essential Needs & Connections/Retriever Essentials: Helps students access basic necessities like housing and food security, including the free store in The Commons.

• Student Conduct & Community Standards: Promotes a safe, fair, and respectful environment where everyone can learn. We help uphold our shared values of integrity, accountability, and mutual respect.

• Veteran & Military-Affiliated Services: Provides tailored guidance, support, and engagement for military-connected students.

Where to find us

If you ever need support and aren't sure where to turn, visit us in The Center for Well-Being (Room 102) or email deanofstudents@umbc.edu.

Fun challenge: If you’ve read down to this sentence, drop me a quick email at the address above and I will host you for a cup of coffee or tea at Starbucks or Dunkin. I’d love to know what you’re most looking forward to this semester.

I am incredibly proud to be a Retriever, and I wish you all the best as we kick off this academic year together.

Go Retrievers!

Dr. Jake Diaz
Assistant Vice President and Dean of Students

Join the Division of Research & Creative Achievement (ORCA), Creative Achievement and Research Administration Team (CARAT), and the Dresher Center for the Humanities as we welcome Chris Thornton, Chief Programs Officer, American Council of Learned Socities (ACLS) for a visit to UMBC on Wednesday, September 23.

Throughout the day, Chris will meet with research faculty and administrators on campus to discuss the state of humanities research at UMBC and will lead a funding workshop.

More details will be forthcoming!

Welcome/ Welcome Back COEIT Retrievers!

COEIT Advisors are here to help new and returning COEIT students!

If you need help with a schedule adjustment or have general questions please see the information below for the various ways to connect with a COEIT Advisor.

ALL Computer Science and Engineering Majors/ Pre-Majors & First Semester IS/BTA Freshmen:

Schedule an online or in person appointment here.

For quick questions email:  coeitadvising@umbc.edu

Attend Weekday Walk In Advising- Sign in Sheet Located outside of ITE 204*:

Thursday, August 20th  - Friday, September 4th:  10:00 - 12:00 & 1:00 - 3:00

*Please bring your laptop to Walk In Advising if you need to make schedule adjustments. 


Information Systems & BTA Transfer Students and Continuing Students:
Please consult advising Information for the IS Department here

This is the sixth post in our series on the new LER briefs. Catch the intro post here if you missed it.

Over the last several posts, we've looked at microcredentials from the vantage point of students, faculty, advisors, and employers. This one zooms out to the state and federal level — because the individual pieces we've covered are actually part of something bigger.

The problem, briefly

The traditional resume — degrees, titles, past employers — is losing ground as the main way to signal what someone can actually do. Employers report difficulty finding qualified candidates even as resumes pile up, and workers who built real skills outside traditional degree paths often go unrecognized.

The Learning and Employment Record (LER) is the response to that gap: a verified digital record of a person's skills, credentials, and experiences that travels with them across institutions and employers, whether those skills came from a classroom, a co-op, the military, or the job itself.

This isn't a niche idea anymore. In December, the U.S. House held a bipartisan hearing on how LERs empower workers and expand opportunity. In April, Congress introduced the MATCH Act, aimed at building state-led talent marketplaces around verified credentials. Globally, a large majority of employers now use skills-based hiring, and states like Alabama and Indiana have already stood up their own credential marketplaces.

Maryland doesn't have that infrastructure yet. UMBC is helping build it.

What UMBC has already built

Since 2015, UMBC has issued verified digital microcredentials across curricular, co-curricular, and work-integrated learning, now over 200 active credentials, with 84 new ones added just in the past year. That work is backed by real governance: the Microcredential Advisory Committee sets strategy, and the Microcredential Review Board evaluates every proposal against a published rubric. That governance model has been cited by institutions including Kennesaw State, the University of Colorado Boulder, UMGC, and the University of Florida.

This past year, UMBC was also selected as one of only 25 institutions nationwide for the inaugural LER Accelerator cohort, and Maryland had more institutions represented in that cohort than any other state.

The Maryland opportunity

Maryland's Higher Education Commission has already urged institutions to address degree inflation and build alternative credential pathways. The University System of Maryland's Vision 2030 identifies credential issuance as a priority, and its Alternative Credentials Task Force has been developing guidance shaped largely by UMBC's model.

What's still missing: a shared credential registry, a statewide coordinating body, and a common framework connecting higher ed, workforce agencies, and industry. Conversations between AACRAO and state agencies such as MHEC and the Maryland Department of Labor have begun but haven't yet become a coordinated effort. That window is open right now, and Maryland's four LER Accelerator institutions (UMBC, UMGC, Johns Hopkins, and Morgan State) provide the state with a ready-made network to build on.

The bottom line

UMBC isn't starting from scratch here; a decade of credentials, governance, scholarship, and statewide networks (including the Maryland Digital Credentialing Community of Practice) are already in place. With federal legislation moving and Maryland agencies naming the gap, what's needed now isn't more program-building at UMBC. It's state-level coordination that brings institutions, employers, and agencies together to turn strong individual programs into a functioning talent marketplace.

That's a bigger conversation than any one office can carry alone. If your work touches on state policy, employer partnerships, or workforce development, this is a good time to pay attention.

Want the full brief? Read it here.

Questions? Submit a support ticket or reach out to the DCI team directly.

Welcome/ Welcome Back COEIT Retrievers!

COEIT Advisors are here to help new and returning COEIT students!

If you need help with a schedule adjustment or have general questions please see the information below for the various ways to connect with a COEIT Advisor.

ALL Computer Science and Engineering Majors/ Pre-Majors & First Semester IS/BTA Freshmen:

Schedule an online or in person appointment here.

For quick questions email:  coeitadvising@umbc.edu

Attend Weekday Walk In Advising- Sign in Sheet Located outside of ITE 204*:

Thursday, August 21st - Friday, September 4th:  10:00 - 12:00 & 1:00 - 3:00

*Please bring your laptop to Walk In Advising if you need to make schedule adjustments. 


Information Systems & BTA Transfer Students and Continuing Students:
Please consult advising Information for the IS Department here

For today's College Bootcamp topic, we are focusing on the big picture skills you should be developing throughout your undergraduate career. No matter what your post-graduate plans are, prospective employers and/or professional/graduate schools will all NEED for you to bring along your science and content knowledge, but they will WANT to see development of transferable skills such as leadership, curiosity, service, resilience, etc. 

In the case of Medical School specifically, admissions boards have developed an overview of what kind of skills or -- "core competencies" -- they are looking for.  Check out the AAMC list of Core Compentencis for Medical School Applicants HERE. 

While some inter- and intra- personal skills can be developed in the classroom (such as reslience, and oral/written communication), there are many opportunities across the UMBC community (and beyond) where skills like empathy, reliability, service, and cultural awareness can be excercised and honed. Consider joining a student organization, volunteering with the Shriver Center, or studying abroad for a semester -- or two! Opportunities abound and with every experience you are developing your core competencies, your competitiveness for your post-graduate plans, and even a greater sense of self and what YOU can offer a prospective employer or graduate school. Every alumni can tell you about a transformative experience that they had while an undergrad and you may be surprised to hear how many take place outside of the classroom! 

Take a look at the videos below in order to get a sense of both how to develop your core competencies and why. 

Cardio for the Cortex w/Emma Barnaby (CNMS Student Success Coach)

Give me 5 minutes and I'll get you into Medical School w/Dr. Jubbal from Medical Insiders

Campus Talks: The Real-World Power of Soft Skills w/Times Higher Education (UK based)

BONUS PMED VIDEO: Design Your PMED Journey 2026 from the AAMC 

Join us again tomorrow for another playlist that will cover specific insight to your BIOL and CHEM coursework. Don't miss out! 

Stay with us everyday this week to strengthen your skills and power your future. It starts today! 

A common saying is “Health is wealth.” Its meaning—that good health gives people the vitality to succeed in life—is found in stories and phrases across cultures and times. Dong Li, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, has long nurtured an interest in helping people stay in good health, from his early childhood interest in becoming a doctor to his current research focusing on developing cost-effective and widely accessible health monitoring technologies. 

As the founder and director of the Future Sensing and Interaction Lab, Li studies how affordable devices, such as smartphones and watches, can monitor general health indicators, vital signs, and physical activities. Li also explores how to build innovative computer-human interfaces to deliver an intuitive user experience. His goal is to use the advanced sensing technologies on many smart devices to help people improve their well-being. 

“I am a tech believer,” Li says. “Technology has enormous potential to make change, and that’s why I have devoted my efforts and my time to try to develop applications of technology that benefit society.”

Li shares here about his work, its challenges, and his hopes for a world where healthcare is both affordable and accessible. 

Q: What are your main areas of research? 

A: My main area of research is what we usually call mobile health, or mHealth. The goal is to make health intelligence more accessible by using everyday devices that people already have, such as smartphones, earphones, smartwatches, and even smart rings. 

For example, in several projects in my lab, we’re exploring ways to measure things like blood pressure and skin stiffness using a smartphone. One way to think about it is this: as human beings, we have eyes, ears, and a nose that help us sense the world around us. So what if we could use our smartphones as an additional sensing tool—not just to understand our environment, but to sense what’s happening inside our own bodies, such as blood pressure, heart rate, respiration rate, and other physiological signals?

The second part of my research focuses on AI. We’re interested in building AI models that can use data collected from these everyday devices to detect signs of disease at an early stage. Large language models like ChatGPT, for example, are trained on huge amounts of language data. In a similar way, we can train health-related AI models on large amounts of physiological data collected from devices people use in their daily lives. The question is whether the model can learn subtle patterns in that data that may indicate the early stages of disease.

The third part of my research is about security and privacy. If we’re collecting sensitive health information, we need to make sure both the AI model and the overall system are secure, and that people’s private information is protected. 

Q: What motivated you to get involved in these areas of research?

To be honest, when I was in primary school, my dream was to become a doctor. But somehow, I ended up choosing computer science as my major.

After I completed my Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and joined UMBC as a faculty member, I learned about opportunities for internal research funding and collaboration between UMBC and the University of Maryland, Baltimore, which has long-established professional schools in areas such as medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, and nursing.

When I heard about those opportunities, I immediately thought, “Okay, this is my chance to reconnect with that childhood dream.” I realized I could combine my background in computer science with healthcare and work on interdisciplinary research that could have a real impact on people’s health.

So in a way, I didn’t become a doctor, but I found another path that allows me to contribute to medicine through technology. That’s really what motivated me to move into this area of research. 

Q: How do you hope the research will impact ordinary people’s lives down the road?

Our long-term vision is to make health monitoring more accessible and affordable for everyone. Right now, if we want to monitor certain aspects of our health, we often have to go to a doctor for regular examinations or use specialized medical equipment, which can be expensive and may not be easily available to everyone.

What we hope to do is bring some of that monitoring capability into the everyday devices people already use, such as smartphones, earphones, smartwatches, or even smart glasses. Instead of relying only on specialized equipment, people could potentially use these familiar devices to better understand and monitor their health in their daily lives.

If our research is successful, we hope it can give people a simple and convenient way to keep track of their health, identify potential problems earlier, and make more informed decisions about when to seek medical care. Ultimately, the goal is to use technology to help people live healthier lives.

Q: What are the biggest challenges that the research will need to overcome to reach these goals?

The most challenging part is not technical. What I realized when I talked to the clinical doctors from UMB School of Medicine is that the challenge is how to make people aware of this development. The challenge is assuring people of data security.  People ask questions like, “What about privacy? How can you make sure you don’t leak our private information?” I think that’s the biggest challenge we will have if we want to make this a product that everybody can benefit from: How can we communicate about the technology so that people can understand it and are willing to use our product in the future?

Q: Do you have any recent results that you are especially excited about?

Yes. We are doing the clinical trials for our blood pressure monitoring project. We have collected data, I believe, from 30 healthy subjects right now, and we are in the process of collecting data from hypertensive patients at the hospital. The data we have right now shows very promising results, and I’m very excited to see if our prototype can work for those hypertensive patients. If it does, I think our next step is that we could do a wider deployment to verify our system. I attended the Maryland NEW VENTURE program [an intensive 12-week accelerator run by bwtech@UMBC that helps early-stage technology founders]. I shared this story with a lot of our investors, and they are super excited about this product. Maybe sometime next year, we will establish a startup company to make it a real product to benefit ordinary people.

Written by: Ramya Bommakanti, a senior information systems major and communications intern in the COEIT Dean’s office.

A team of researchers from the College of Engineering and Information Technology has received the Best Paper Award at the ACM RESPECT 2026 conference, which was held in Chicago June 8-10, 2026. The winning paper, "Beyond Representation: Mechanisms of Culturally Affirming Mentorship for Black and Latinx Students in STEM," was authored by Isabella Lopez ’23, computer science, M.S. ’25, human-centered computing, Maria Sanchez, director of the Engineering and Computing Education Program, and Sanorita Dey, assistant professor of computer science and electrical engineering.

The ACM RESPECT (Research on Equity and Sustained Participation in Computing, Engineering, and Technology) conference is organized by the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM’s) Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education. The best paper award recognized the team's work in exploring effective mentorship strategies for Black and Latinx students within STEM disciplines. 

This research, initially supported by a 2024 COEIT Interdisciplinary Proposal award, has evolved into an innovative extension of the team’s work. The researchers are now pioneering hands-on experiential learning processes that leverage AI-assisted technologies. Instead of relying on passive “success stories,” these new tools empower students to actively explore the personal journeys, systemic challenges, and strategic resilience of STEM role models, helping students to connect more deeply with the complex paths to professional achievement. 

Mark Marten, professor and chair of Chemical, Biochemical, and Environmental Engineering (CBEE), has been named an American Chemical Society (ACS) Fellow for 2026. This distinction recognizes and honors his outstanding achievements in and contributions to science and the chemistry profession. He will be celebrated at the ACS Fall 2026 meeting in Chicago.

"I am delighted to see Dr. Mark Marten recognized as an ACS Fellow,” Dean Jeanne van Briesen said. “Dr. Marten's leadership as department chair, combined with a career of impactful research and service, has made a lasting contribution to our institution and the field."

Photo: Mark Marten (right) with students Matthew Quintanilla (left), Garrett Hill (center) and in the lab. (Marlayna Demond '11/UMBC)

Marten has been a member of the CBEE department since 1996. In 1999 he received the NSF CAREER award, one of the most prestigious federal grants supporting early-career faculty, and in 2007 he was honored with the Maryland Board of Regents Award for Collaboration in Research. In 2023, Marten won the ACS Braude Award in recognition of his support of research involving students. He started his biotechnology company MycoInnovation, LLC to commercialize his research to use fungi to produce engineered proteins.

“The ACS Division of Biochemical Technology has been my professional home for over 30 years, through both my research in fungal systems and cellular engineering and my leadership roles within the Division,” Marten says. “All of this makes being recognized as a Fellow particularly meaningful.” 

Tim Oates, professor of computer science and electrical engineering, has been awarded the Wilson H. Elkins Academic Transformation Professorship for fiscal year 2027.

The professorship, which includes a $10,000 award, was granted by the University System of Maryland to support Oates’s innovative project, “Persistent Cognitive Support for Student Success: A Generative AI Approach to Academic Transformation.” The review committee expressed praise for the proposal, noting its potential to create a lasting impact at both UMBC and across the broader educational landscape. 

The work focuses on using generative AI to provide students with customized tools to assist in the completion of academic tasks—such as breaking down assignments into manageable steps, organizing and managing time, and monitoring progress. These tools will engage students through a conversational interface that adapts to provide context-aware support that moves beyond the limitations of existing standard question-answer models. The work builds on UMBC’s culture of interdisciplinary collaboration and its dedication to translating foundational AI research into practical, student-centered support solutions. 

“We are confident that the knowledge and experience gained from this work will have a significant impact on the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and beyond,” the award committee stated.