In the interest of transparency and accountability, the Election Board will make public every time it finds a candidate has violated Election Rules and issues a sanction in response.

A complaint was reported to the Election Board that a UMBC student had promoted the Hediyah Sadeq Campaign in a student organization GroupMe chat.

The Election Board voted that per Rule #6 and Rule #17, this promotion was a violation because it occurred within a Student Organization group chat where not all members had opted in to hear the information. Furthermore, the organization had not submitted an official endorsement for the candidate’s campaign.

Consequently, the Election Board voted that the proper sanction for the violation was an official warning to the Hediyah Sadeq Campaign.

A reminder to all students and student organizations: Students may not promote an individual’s campaign in a student organization chat/social media channel but are welcome to do so on their own personal, social media pages.

Any student may file a complaint about potential violations of the Election Rules by completing an RT Ticket.

This story was written by Sarah Hansen and first appeared on news.umbc.edu

UMBC professors Kevin Sowers and Upal Ghosh have advanced a new technique to eliminate PCBs—one of the most persistent, pervasive, and dangerous chemical pollutants found in waterway sediments. Their innovative, environmentally-friendly approach, published in Environmental Science and Technology, resulted in reducing PCBs by over 50 percent in treated areas.

Sowers, a professor of marine biotechnology, and Ghosh, a professor of chemical, biochemical, and environmental engineering, had been working on PCB removal separately for years. Only recently did they realize their separate efforts could be combined to create a new, more-effective way to get rid of dangerous PCBs, even in ecologically sensitive or hard-to-reach areas, such as around piers and in fragile wetlands. Sowers and Ghosh have now formed a company, Rembac Environmental, to help bring their process to more areas that need PCB remediation.

From required to “remove it!”

PCBs were used extensively as fire retardants—and even required in some products—until they were banned in the U.S. in 1979 because of findings suggesting they might be neurotoxic, disrupt animals’ endocrine systems, and possibly cause cancer. Despite the fact that the ban has been in place for decades, PCBs still persist in sediments around the country, including in Chesapeake Bay. In the Mid-Atlantic, PCBs are the second most common reason for public advisories against consuming fish, just behind mercury.

“If they were to be left alone, PCBs would be in the sediments for decades, and depending on the level it could be a century,” says Sowers. “They’re very stable,” he adds. “That was their selling point.”

The best techniques to deal with PCBs are dredging, which physically removes the PCBs from the area (along with loads of sediment), and capping, which involves piling gravel on top of the sediment to keep the PCBs from interacting with aquatic life above. While each method has its place in the fight against PCB contamination, both are extremely costly, cannot be deployed in ecologically sensitive areas, and are not always effective.

People have tried for decades to develop and sell methods to remove PCBs from sediments biologically. Microorganisms that can break down PCBs occur naturally in sediment, and most efforts have focused on encouraging their populations to grow by adding cocktails of nutrients. None of those prior efforts worked especially well, and Sowers remembers hearing repeatedly that biological removal of PCBs was impossible, but he wasn’t quite ready to give up on the idea.

Never give up

“The technology itself started in the 1980s,” Sowers says, when officials were trying to show that naturally-occurring microbes alone could take care of PCBs in the Hudson River. The effort was not successful, because scientists couldn’t identify the specific microbes doing the work. In the mid-1990s, Sowers and another collaborator, Hal May at the Medical University of South Carolina, identified the species, and soon after that, they developed a method for growing them in the lab without sediment.

“Once we could isolate them, we could study them. We learned enough about them to scale them up and inject them back into sediment,” he says. And finally, about nine years ago, “We found that if we added them in high numbers, we could get rid of the PCBs.” Bingo.

Upal Ghosh (left) and Kevin Sowers in Sowers’s lab at the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Well, almost. Sowers was still delivering the PCB-eating microbes to sediment set up in the lab. How could he inject the microbes over huge bodies of water in the real world?

Sowers’s microbes need to enter the sediment and settle there, not float around in the water. He needed a delivery method that was safe for sensitive areas, relatively quick, and ideally much less expensive than dredging or capping.

Collaboration opens doors

In parallel with Sowers’s work, Ghosh had also been working for years on PCB remediation, but he’d taken a different approach. He had developed pellets made of activated carbon. When the pellets enter the sediment, they bond tightly to PCBs.

“It doesn’t eliminate the PCBs, but it reduces the risk of PCBs getting into the food chain,” he explains. This, in turn, reduces the danger to aquatic life, and the need for fish consumption advisories.

Because carbon is one of the key building blocks of all life, it also wasn’t a significant environmental threat. Ghosh founded a company called Sediment Solutions to produce the pellets, known as SediMite. But it wasn’t until Ghosh and Sowers met that they realized their projects could complement each other.

“Working together allowed us to see the bottlenecks,” Ghosh says.

One breakthrough for the new team was figuring out why the naturally occurring PCB-eaters weren’t enough to have a substantial impact in bodies of water. As an environmental engineer, Ghosh dived into examining the energy balance in the sediment environment, and found it just wouldn’t facilitate growth of those populations in large enough numbers. “You need the microbes in higher levels to see PCB degradation happen in months, and not decades or centuries,” he explains.

With that realization, they began to see the tremendous potential of their partnership. Sowers could produce the microbes that could eliminate PCBs, and Ghosh had pellets that would settle into the sediment—a novel delivery mechanism for the microbes. “When we started working and talking together, we realized, ‘I can solve your problem and you can solve my problem,’” Ghosh says.

Scaling up

Their new publication is the result of the first field trial of the new combined technology. Sowers and Ghosh found a way to bind the microbes to the pellets, and sprayed them into a polluted body of water on the Quantico Marine Corps Base, which drains into the Potomac River. The Department of Defense funded the trial as part of its commitment to clean up PCB contamination at military bases.

The experiment was a success, showing not only that the method is effective at removing PCBs, but also that it didn’t negatively impact the local environment in any detectable way. Ghosh and Sowers also found that the plot treated with the combined microbes and pellets showed a greater reduction in PCBs than a plot treated with the carbon pellets alone. This is the first concrete evidence that a biological approach to removing PCBs can work if delivered in the right way.

Ghosh and Sowers hope the technique will become popular for use in sensitive and hard-to-reach areas. For now, their company is working with another biotech firm to produce the microbes at large scale, but as they take on more remediation projects, they hope to expand their company and start growing the organisms themselves, Sowers says.

It’s taken a long time to get to this point, partly because environmental work of this sort is scrutinized so heavily, “for good reasons,” Ghosh says. But now, Sowers adds, “The most exciting thing is seeing it out there in the field.”

Banner image: Kevin Sowers (left) and Upal Ghosh in Sowers’s lab at the Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

This story was written by Megan Hanks and first appeared on news.umbc.edu

“Cybersecurity research is important because we live in a connected world. As a society, we have an expectation to conduct professional business in a safe and secure technology environment,” says Donna Ruginski, UMBC’s new executive director for cybersecurity initiatives. “Research is thriving at UMBC, and some of the nation’s leading cybersecurity research is being conducted at UMBC.”

Ruginski joins the Office of the Vice President for Research as the first campus leader to hold this partnership-focused cybersecurity role.

“I am delighted to join the UMBC community and to work with its visionary leadership and extraordinary faculty and staff,” she says. “UMBC’s capabilities and resources in cybersecurity contribute to the region’s economic development through a comprehensive cybersecurity focus on academic education, research, workforce development, technology incubators, and entrepreneurship. UMBC truly offers the complete package, making it an exciting place to be.”

Ruginski brings significant experience in cybersecurity to her new role at UMBC. She holds a master’s degree in computer science from Johns Hopkins University and has founded and served as a senior technology executive at software companies over the course of her career.

Karl V. Steiner, vice president for research at UMBC, says Ruginski’s role is important for UMBC, for Maryland, and for the United States. “UMBC is already recognized for its strength in the growing field of cybersecurity and through our strong relationships with federal agencies and the private sector,” Steiner explains. “Ruginski comes to us with an exceptional background and strong skill set that will enable our community to thrive and successfully pursue exciting new opportunities in the years to come.”

In her new role, Ruginski will work to enhance awareness of UMBC’s broad portfolio of cybersecurity initiatives and expand research partnerships with public and private organizations, says Steiner.

“Expanding cybersecurity research at UMBC will offer additional opportunities for faculty and students at all levels,” says Ruginski. “I’m excited to supportUMBC’s growing reputation as a leading research institution.”

Banner image: Donna Ruginski. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

UMBC’s David Di Maria recently visited Capitol Hill to brief Congressional staff on a key issue affecting higher education and the U.S. economy: opportunities for international students. To attend a U.S. university, international students must complete a student visa process, which can be both long and confusing for prospective students, their families, and the U.S. colleges and universities they hope to attend. With numerous immigration and education policy bills pending before Congress, Di Maria and colleagues in the higher education community offered their international education expertise to inform the debate.

Di Maria, associate vice provost for international education, spoke during the session “Student Visas, International Students, and the American Innovation Ecosystem.” He and other experts from the education and business communities provided perspectives on issues like visa processing and renewal procedures, the importance of international students to the U.S. economy, and ways to retain international students as members of the U.S. workforce after graduation.

Economic impacts

Di Maria, who is known as a U.S. expert in the international education community, highlighted that international students “boost innovation, support 455,000 U.S. jobs, contribute nearly $40 billion to the U.S. economy, bring unique diversity to our campuses, and bolster U.S. foreign policy.” According to NAFSA: Association of International Educators, during the 2017-18 academic year, the nearly 20,000 international students enrolled at Maryland institutions of higher education contributed more than $700 million to the State’s economy, and supported more than 8,600 jobs.

UMBC has maintained strong international student enrollment, with more than 1,000 international students attending UMBC annually over the past several years. However, many other universities across the country have been challenged by declines in international student enrollments, which can, in turn, negatively affect the economies of individual states and the U.S. as a whole.

Opportunities for students and the nation

In addition to speaking about international student enrollments, Di Maria also discussed employment for these students after graduation.

Di Maria noted that visa caps and related policies result in U.S. schools producing “highly trained individuals and sending them somewhere else” for employment. He explained that in addition to affecting opportunities for the students, this prevents the U.S. from reaping the economic benefits that these recent graduates will provide when they enter the workforce, a point reiterated by panelist Jon Baselice from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Kinu Harichandran, an international student from Pakistan, shared her experience as a graduate student at Georgetown University, where she earned a master’s and is working on a Ph.D. in vaccine research. She recounted the process for renewing her visa during her doctoral studies, and the toll it took on her research because she had to return to Pakistan for the renewal process.

During the several months Ms. Harichandran was in Pakistan, her professor monitored her research to keep it from being lost. She said her story is not unique, noting “professors are hesitant to take international Ph.D. students because of the possibility for gaps in research.”

When asked for one takeaway for the assembled Congressional staff, Di Maria recommended that the U.S. implement a national-level international education strategy, improve support for students, and adopt immigration policies that allow the U.S. to retain top graduates in our workforce. This, he suggested, could have a major impact by helping the U.S. attract international students, improving their experience, and encouraging them to contribute their skills and talents as members of the U.S. workforce.

This story was written by Mary Ann Richmond ’93, history. Featured image: David Di Maria, associate vice provost for international education, in the UMBC Commons. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.