Want to launch a venture, understand start-up and small business financing, or how to fund social ventures? 

If you are thinking about starting a business, joining a high-growth startup, or being an intrapreneur or social preneur, ENTR 330: Entrepreneurial Finance will give you the real-world money skills to succeed. Here are 5 quick reasons to add it to your schedule:

• Learn to Manage Real Cash Flow: Discover how early-stage businesses actually manage money and keep the doors open before turning a profit.  Learn about how to create a funding plan that's sustainable.

• Counts as an Entrepreneurship Minor Upper-Level Elective! 

• Understand how investor's think.

• Develop a pitch deck ready for investors.

• Boost Your Resume for Any Career: These financial skills aren't just for founders—they are essential if you want to work in your own venture, startup operations, or corporate innovation.

Ready to gain a competitive edge? Talk to your academic advisor about adding Entrepreneurial Finance to your course load this semester!

If you haven't taken the prereqs (ENTR 200 or 201), email Kevin Fulmer for permission to take the class.  kevinf@umbc.edu.

Don't miss this class--it's only offered in the Fall Semester!

Class will be held on Wednesdays from 4:30-7 pm.

Instructor: Jonathan Sachs, Director of Workforce Development, Baltimore County

September 10, 2-3:30pm, join the Nature Sacred Foundaiton in celebrating 30 years of community stories in nature!

Join us in celebrating Nature Sacred’s 30
anniversary at our Little Yellow Journal Tour
event at UMBC! Immerse yourself in a
mindfulness walk, journaling exercise, and enjoy
the company of others. All supplies provided.

Snacks and refreshments will be available.

See the attached flyer for details.

CSEE Assistant Professor Clement Fung is teaching a new special topics class this fall on Applied AI for Cybersecurity.  It will cover the intersection of AI with a broad selection of cybersecurity topics, such as network security, systems security, usable security, and more. The class is open to both undergraduate and graduate students and will meet on Tuesday and Thursday from 9:30-10:45 in Engineering 231.

CADVC presents Somewhere Over the Rainbow of Row Homes, We Fly, an intergenerational group exhibition organized by curator Angela N.Carroll and featuring artists based in, or deeply connected to, Baltimore. On view from August 25 through November 24, the exhibitionc onsiders the city’s fertile cultural landscape through experimental and interdisciplinary artistic practices. Its title is inspired by the narrative poetry ofm ultidisciplinary artist NIA JUNE.

Baltimore is a city of dreamers. The creative genius that pervades the region offers profound perspectives about the power of our collective imagination to transform our world. As the world grapples with myriad crises—forever wars, widespread economic insecurity, and threats against democracy—the artistic perspectives presented in Somewhere Over the Rainbow of Row Homes, We Fly are radically optimistic about humanity’s ability to triumph over adversity.

The exhibition brings together a range of artists and artistic mediums with works by Kelvin Bulluck, Roy Crosse, Brianna Faulkner, Darrius Fox, Lehna Huie, Jeffrey Kent, Ada Pinkston, Kim Rice,  Margaret Rorison, Ernest Shaw, Shan Wallace, and Jasmine Gabrielle Washington, and a public presentation of a filmic work produced by the collective NIA JUNE + Kirby Griffin + APoetNamedNate. Through serial compositions, photographic triptychs, poetic floating installations, and kaleidoscopic cinema, these artists contemplate themes of home, memory, and community.

In the words of curator Angela N. Carroll, “The exhibition celebrates and affirms alternate conceptions of reality through speculative and abstract anti-representational expressions and forms. Glitch, distortion, rupture, and defiant challenges to traditional technical and material applications offer prescient responses to the tumultuousness of the 21st century.”  

Exhibition Programming

September 3, 6–8 pm

Opening reception and artist panel—with Brianna Faulkner, Jeffrey Kent, Kim Rice, Margaret Rorison, and Shan Wallace in conversation, moderated by Angela N. Carroll

October 15, 6–8 pm

Free outdoor concert featuring Brandon Woody alongside public projection of “The Unveiling of God/ a love letter to my forefathers”by NIA JUNE + Kirby Griffin + APoetNamedNate.

November 5, 6–8 pm

Artist roundtable on experimental practice, moderated by Ernest Shaw

November 19, 6–8 pm

Artist roundtable on memory, communal and familial archives, and land sovereignty, moderated by Jasmine Gabrielle Washington

Our exhibitions and events are free and open to the public for full participation by all individuals regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, or any other protected category under applicable federal law, state law, and the University’s nondiscrimination policy.

If you need special accommodatinos at one of our events, whether in person or online, or to experience an exhibition, please contact CADVC at cadvc@umbc.edu.

David Mountain, Ph.D. ’17, computer engineering, can’t tell you much about his job. It still sounds exciting. As a researcher at the National Security Agency (NSA)—sometimes jokingly called the “No Such Agency” because of its top secret signal intelligence and cybersecurity work—Mountain worked to develop groundbreaking computing technology over a career spanning more than four decades. 

“The most fun projects started with an operational organization [within NSA] asking us, ‘Can you do this [perhaps wild-sounding] thing?’ and ended with them telling us they fielded the devices we built and they are working great,” he says.

Pop culture often portrays the NSA as a shadowy spy agency. From Mountain’s perspective, his job was not the thrilling escapades of James Bond, but had a certain resemblance to the high-tech wizardry of Q, who supplies Bond with his cool gadgets. Mountain’s colleagues were curious people who loved tackling hard science, math, and engineering problems. Add to that the mission of protecting U.S. national security and it equaled a fulfilling work environment. 

Looking back, Mountain splits his career into two approximately 15-year blocks, the first spent “doing really hardcore technical stuff,” from which he earned numerous patents, and the second half coordinating the work of technical teams and mentoring the next generation of researchers. Along the way, he also spent multiple years taking advantage of NSA internship and development programs.

Sometimes Mountain’s work did see public light, such as his research into building flexible electronics, with applications in “smart” clothing, autonomous vehicles, solar panels, and more. The research was shared with industry through the NSA’s Technology Transfer Program. 

Now (mostly) retired, Mountain says the best part of his job was the opportunity to constantly explore new topics and take on new challenges. 

“The government was really good about education and developing people, and I took full advantage of that,” Mountain says. “I got paid to learn new things, and that was great.”

Imagining a new type of computer hardware

It was the love of learning that brought Mountain late in his career to UMBC as a Ph.D. student. He had already made use of NSA programs to earn his master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park, and to take research sabbaticals. After enrolling as a UMBC student in 2014, Mountain worked with his advisor Anupam Joshi, a computer science and electrical engineering professor and now the university’s chief A.I. officer, on a Ph.D. dissertation exploring a concept called neuromorphic computing.

In neuromorphic computing, researchers take inspiration from the human brain to reimagine traditional computing hardware. While traditional computers perform data processing and memory operations in physically separate units, neuromorphic systems merge the functions at artificial “synapses.” Neuromorphic systems also generally trigger calculations when they receive an input signal, rather than performing operations at regular, clock-based intervals. These changes improve computers’ energy efficiency and adaptability when applied to most AI tasks today, such as image and speech recognition.

For his Ph.D., Mountain analyzed a new type of electrical circuit building block, called a memristor, that shows promise in neuromorphic computing. Mountain explored how arrays of memristors divided into small chunks, or “tiles,” could be flexibly combined to handle a variety of tasks, including recognizing hand-written digits and detecting malware. The conclusion, Mountain says, was that with additional hardware improvements it should be possible to build a general purpose neuromorphic computer—similar to our general purpose personal computers of today—that could handle a wide variety of tasks with both high performance and energy efficiency. 

Mountain was drawn to UMBC for his Ph.D. in part because of its close proximity to where he worked in the Advanced Computing Systems group of the NSA’s Laboratory for Physical Sciences, located at the bwtech@UMBC Research and Technology Park. The Laboratory for Physical Sciences is a partnership that the government runs with industry and university partners to advance research in communication, sensing, and computer technologies. Prior to beginning his Ph.D. work, Mountain had developed many positive relationships with UMBC faculty and students, including collaborating with Matthias Gobbert, a professor of mathematics and statistics at UMBC, on several high-performance computing research projects for undergraduate students, funded by the National Science Foundation. 

During his Ph.D. research, Mountain took numerous UMBC graduate courses, and credits computer science and electrical engineering professor Fow-Sen Choa and associate professor Ryan Robucci with providing valuable guidance and support that shaped his research. 

“I was a non-traditional student and everyone supported me in that,” Mountain says. 

“David is super smart and well respected,” Joshi says. Joshi’s own Ph.D. thesis explored how computers might learn like biological brains, specifically examining how a type of machine learning approach called neural networks could be organized in a similar way to the early stages of human’s visual processing system. “With David, the research came full circle,” Joshi says. “I looked at how biology could be emulated in software. David was looking at how to create the hardware.” 

Staying connected and giving back

Mountain lives in the southwest Baltimore neighborhood of Ten Hills, a 10-minute drive from the UMBC campus. Since graduating with his Ph.D., he has served on the advisory board for the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, networked with students at various career-focused events, and developed and taught a graduate level quantum computing course, designed to help build the quantum workforce by providing computer scientists and engineers with an accessible introduction to core quantum computing concepts.

On May 28, Mountain served as an expert panelist at an event organized by the Hilltop Society exploring how AI can create a healthier, safer, and more efficient future. He was joined by Jennifer Sleeman, Ph.D. ’17, computer science, a senior AI research scientist at The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, and Chris Valentino ’02, M.S. ’06, information systems, the vice president of cyber and information solutions at Northrop Grumman.

Enjoying semi-retirement with his wife, Diane, with whom he raised four children, Mountain now regularly travels, visits the theatre and museums, and takes the occasional consulting gig. “My wife and I joke that we have become wise asses on the hill,” he says. He’s happy to dispense opinions on the future of computing and AI, the prospects of data centers in space, and more. Just don’t ask him too much about what he did for a living. 

Join us today for a COEIT Research Panel!

What does research look like in the College of Engineering and Information Technology?

This panel will be a great opportunity to learn about some of the research and projects that COEIT Faculty are currently involved in. Research as an undergraduate student is important but sometimes it’s hard to know where to start. These faculty members will talk you through their process and talk about how they got to where they are in this panel. 

Joining information below!

COEIT Research Panel
Thursday, August 13 · 12:00 – 1:00pm
Google Meet joining info
Video call link: https://meet.google.com/kms-jnqi-nnr
Or dial: (US) +1 941-462-3791 PIN: 992 076 429#
More phone numbers: https://tel.meet/kms-jnqi-nnr?pin=4383892941807

Scope of the supported project

Dr. Justin Webster's most recent NSF grant is on the mathematical foundations of the motion of a fluid through a deformable medium.  An integral part of the award is the training of doctoral students and postdoctoral collaborators.

Research

Fluid flow can deform a material through which it moves, while deformation of that material can in turn change the flow. This interaction occurs, for example, when groundwater moves through saturated soil or rock, when fluids are injected or extracted from subsurface regions, and when blood move through and around soft biological tissues. These systems are complex, because the fluid and the surrounding material respond to one another in tandem.

This NSF-supported research develops and studies the partial differential equations (PDEs) used to describe such interactions, with the goal of understanding when such mathematical models can be used reliably for prediction, computation, and control of poroelastic filtrations. In particular, Webster and collaborator George Avalos at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln study coupled fluid-poroelastic interaction systems in which a freely moving fluid interfaces with a deformable, fluid-saturated material. Their work develops mathematical foundations for these models, including weak and strong solutions, regularity, spectral properties, and stability, across several physically-motivated regimes and configurations. These results help connect rigorous PDE analysis with computational methods for multiphysics systems arising in engineering, geoscience, and biomechanics.

Training

The collaborative project also supports the training of the next generation of applied mathematicians. At UMBC, the award will support a Ph.D. student, while Webster and Avalos will jointly mentor two doctoral students and a postdoctoral researcher working on problems related to fluid-poroelastic interaction, PDE analysis, and scientific computation.

Related work

• P. Lavagnino, A. Lee, and J. T. Webster, Weak Solutions and Inertial Limits for Quasi-static Filtrations (2026). This paper studies the quasi-static regime and establishes weak solutions through a singular inertial limit.
  Preprint
• G. Avalos, G. Richard, and J. T. Webster, Semigroup Generation for Multilayered Filtrations, Contemporary Mathematics, accepted 2026. The work develops a semigroup framework for a multilayer system coupling free flow, bulk poroelasticity, and a poroelastic plate interface.
  Preprint
• G. Avalos and J. T. Webster, Uniqueness of Weak Solutions for Biot-Stokes Interactions, Pure and Applied Analysis 7 (2025), 1111–1139.
  Journal article · Preprint
• G. Avalos, E. Gurvich, and J. T. Webster, Weak and Strong Solutions for a Fluid-Poroelastic-Structure Interaction via a Semigroup Approach, Mathematical Methods in the Applied Sciences 48 (2024), 4057–4089.
  Journal article · Preprint

Scope of the supported project

Dr. Matthew Kvalheim is the recipient of a Young Investigator Progam (YIP) Award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.  The award is to support a project titled A Topological Approach to Simplifying Hybrid Systems whose purpose is to develop mathematical techniques that simplify the analysis of hybrid systems.

Research

Many systems in engineering and everyday life combine continuous motion with sudden, discrete events. A walking robot, for example, moves continuously while each foot is in the air, but its behavior changes abruptly when a foot strikes the ground. Similar mathematical models arise in autonomous vehicles, mechanical systems with impacts, and devices whose controllers switch between different operating modes. These are called hybrid systems.

Hybrid systems can be extremely complicated, making it difficult to predict how they will behave or to design controllers that make them behave the way we want—for example, keeping a robot walking stably, steering an autonomous system toward a desired state, or preventing undesirable behavior.

The project's goals

This project develops new mathematical tools for replacing complicated hybrid-system models with simpler ones that preserve the behavior we care about. One approach is dimensionality reduction: finding a lower-dimensional description that captures the system's essential dynamics. Another is to find new coordinates in which the equations governing the system become simpler. Using ideas from topology and dynamical systems, we aim to build a general mathematical theory for carrying out these simplifications in hybrid systems. We will also investigate when such simplified representations can—or cannot—be discovered automatically from data by learning algorithms.

Training

The project also supports the training of the next generation of
mathematicians, as the award will support a Ph.D. student at UMBC.

Related work

• M. D. Kvalheim and P. Arathoon, Linearizability of flows by embeddings,  Selecta Mathematica, 32.2 (2026), 38. Journal article · Preprint
• M. D. Kvalheim and E. D. Sontag, Why should autoencoders work?, Transactions on Machine Learning Research (2024). Journal article · Preprint
• P. Arathoon and M. D. Kvalheim, Koopman embedding and super-linearization counterexamples with isolated equilibria(2023).  Preprint
• M. D. Kvalheim, P. Gustafson, and D. E. Koditschek, Conley’s fundamental theorem for a class of hybrid systems, SIAM Journal on Applied Dynamical systems, 20.2 (2021), pp. 784–825.Journal article · Preprint
• J. Eldering, M. D. Kvalheim, and S. Revzen, Global linearization and fiber bundle structure of invariant manifolds, Nonlinearity, 31.9 (2018), pp. 4202–4245. Journal article · Preprint
  

Hello,

I am looking for a language exchange partner to practice my Russian.  I am a male, forty years old, a PhD candidate at UMBC studying democracy policy, and a gay Marrano Jew.

I speak English and Spanish.  I am Honduran so my native dialect is the voseo form of Spanish, but I understand all the Spanish conjugations (vostros, usted, tú, vos).  Additionally, before coming to UMBC, I was a volunteer English tutor for adult refugees in New York City.

I started learning Russian while I was living in New York because I would hear it on the subway so much.  Also, because I have been a Russophile since the fourth grade.  I especially love Russian/Soviet fiction like Bulgakov and Dombrovsky, and I am currently reading War and Peace (in English).

Spasibo,
Felipe Munoz Castillo
felim1@umb.edu

We are pleased to announce the Call for Letters of Intent for Cohort 4 of the UM-BILD Accelerator Program, part of the University of Maryland’s Baltimore Life Science Discovery (UM-BILD) initiative. This National Institutes of Health-supported program is designed to accelerate biomedical innovation, commercialization, and workforce development across the Baltimore region. UM-BILD is a collaborative initiative led by the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) and includes the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC); Morgan State University (MSU); the University of Maryland, College Park; Blackbird Laboratories; and TEDCO’s Maryland Innovation Initiative. Since its launch in September 2023, UM-BILD has supported 35 technology development projects, encompassing therapeutics, medical devices, and digital health solutions. Multiple projects have already advanced to the next phase, as the foundation of a new Maryland spinoff company, or as the subject of a license to an established firm (see selected projects on the UM-BILD Accelerator Awardees page). This progress adds to the momentum that is building Greater Baltimore into a premier life science technology hub.

     As outlined in the Request for Applications on the UM-BILD Accelerator: How to Apply page, UM-BILD will provide support for up to seven projects, each with the potential to advance a promising early-stage biomedical technology. Selected projects will receive up to $75,000 in seed funding for a 12-month period (May 2027 to May 2028). UM-BILD also matches each investigator with a mentor: an established industry figure who offers perspectives on the road ahead. Meanwhile, UM-BILD also offers seminars and events to inform investigators about the challenges and opportunities of entrepreneurship in the biomedical arena.

      To be considered as an investigator in the Accelerator Program, a Letter of Intent must be submitted through the UM-BILD website by 5 p.m. ET on Monday, Sept. 14, 2026. (Late submissions cannot be accepted.)  You can read detailed descriptions of the scope, purpose, and design of this program — and access the application portal on the UM-BILD Accelerator: How to Apply page.     Please share this announcement of an important funding opportunity to eligible innovators (faculty at UMB, UMBC, and MSU).     For questions regarding the application guidelines, please write to UM-BILD@umaryland.edu.

For your convenience, the UM-BILD Application package is attached.