MANDATORY attendance is required at this group advising meeting for any current UMBC freshman or freshman-transfer student who is interested in attending medical, dental, optometry, or veterinary school after graduating from UMBC.

From a pre-health advising perspective, you should attend the Freshman Mandatory Advising Meeting if:

This is your first or second semester in college.
or
You are currently enrolled in CHEM 101 or CHEM 102 or BIOL 141 or BIOL 142.

This meeting will address pre-professional specific advising issues for freshmen such as professional school prerequisite courses, grades, standardized exams, gaining research, clinical, and leadership experience. Between now and the meeting, freshmen should acquire a working knowledge of the information on the office’s website. All freshmen students interested in attending medical, dental, optometry, or veterinary school after they graduate from UMBC, are required to attend.

Pre-professional students have TWO advisors–a Declared Major Advisor and a supplemental, pre-health advisor. Please read about the differences between your TWO advisors here. It is strongly suggested that each student meet with their Declared Major Advisor prior to attending the pre-health group advising session. Only your Declared Major Advisor can lift your registration block.

This session will be conducted two times. The same content will be covered in both sessions. There is no need to RSVP. Please save one of these dates on your calendar.

Mandatory FRESHMAN PreHealth Advising Meeting for pre-medical, dental, optometry, veterinary students
Monday, April 15, 2019
Meyerhoff Chemistry Building, Room 030, Lecture Hall 2
Noon-12:50pm
No need to RSVP.

Remember to join the myUMBC “PreMedical and PreDental Interest Group” under the myUMBC Group directory.

or

Mandatory FRESHMAN PreHealth Advising Meeting for pre-medical, dental, optometry, veterinary students
Wednesday, April 24, 2019
Meyerhoff Chemistry Building, Room 030, Lecture Hall 2
Noon-12:50pm
No need to RSVP.

Remember to join the myUMBC “PreMedical and PreDental Interest Group” under the myUMBC Group directory.

Sponsored by The PreMedical and PreDental Advising Office.

Become a Career Peer

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.

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.

Congratulations to Evan Avila (Economics, Political Science, 2020), winner of the prestigious Truman Scholarship for 2019!

Established in 1975, the Truman Foundation is the nation’s official living memorial to our thirty-third president and The Presidential Memorial to Public Service. The Truman Scholarship is the premier graduate fellowship in the United States for those pursuing careers as public service leaders. Truman Scholars receive up to $30,000 for graduate or professional school, participate in leadership development activities, and have special opportunities for internships and employment with the federal government.

Evan is a Sondheim Public Affairs Scholar and member of the Honors College, studying economics and political science at UMBC. He is passionate about solving the structural disadvantages that marginalized populations face when trying to achieve long-term financial security. “Evan has taken on what other students might consider “boring” endeavors- income tax preparation, working for the U.S. Census Bureau- and turned them into deeply meaningful experiences, ones that he sees as inextricably linked to empowering people. He cares about people who are invisible to many- immigrants, retirees, the poor,” observes April Householder, Director of Undergraduate Research and Prestigious Scholarships.

In 2018, Evan won a national research competition, the iOme Challenge, with policy solutions for gig workers who lack access to qualified retirement plans. He has since been invited to speak on the subject at several policy conferences, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. As President and Site Manager of UMBC’s Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program (VITA), Evan deters predatory tax preparers by training students to prepare free income taxes for over 500 low-income households in the Baltimore area. Evan is has also interned at the U.S. Census Bureau and Treasury Department. After graduation, Evan intends to earn a dual JD/LLM in Taxation and pursue a public service career in tax and social insurance policy.

According to Arthur Johnson, provost emeritus and former director of the Sondheim program, “Evan’s selection is a reflection of the significance and relevance of the service activities that UMBC students are providing through programs such as theSondheim Scholars, Shriver Center, Honors College, and many others.  It also is further evidence that UMBC’s commitment to civic engagement is alive and well among our students. Among many other expectations, TrumanScholars are expected to become leaders of our nation and communities and we are confident that Evan will fulfill those expectations.”

For more information about Truman and other UMBC past prestigious scholarships winners, please visit: https://ur.umbc.edu/prestigious-scholarships/.

Please see below for a curated list of upcoming funding opportunities. The Center for Social Science Scholarship and the Maryland Institute for Policy, Analysis, and Research (MIPAR) assist faculty members and departments in finding funding opportunities and in providing researchers with pre-award and post-grant management assistance. To set up an appointment, email socialscience@umbc.edu.

Program: Grant

An evening with The Avett Brothers

The Art@Work Site Supervisor is a part-time hourly seasonal position, reporting to BOPA’s Community Arts Specialist. Art@Work is a five-week artist apprenticeship program employing Baltimore City youth ages 14-21 to create works of public art in their communities.