Taking to the podium in the lobby of the Performing Arts Building, freshman Amy Vaichalkar began, “We would color the sky and the ground purple. Matter of fact our world was our canvas. But eventually it was reinforced that we need to stay on our paper.”

As they raise their voices and exhibit hand motions to portray emotion in their poems, the audience is drawn into the poets’ craft. Once they finish with a “thank you,” the room is filled with the thundering sound of claps as judges give their scores out of 10.

The Big Prize Poetry Slam, which took place on the evening of March 29, allowed for poets to compete for monetary prizes of $200, $100 and $50. This event is typically held around Homecoming weekend, but due to last year’s water shortage, the Slam had to be pushed back to late March this year.

Hosted by UMBC’s creative writing journal Bartleby, the English Department and the Office of Alumni Relations, the competition drew together the UMBC community to allow a space for creators to deliver their story to the audience.

The event allowed for students to take advantage of the spoken word to express themselves, as Vaichalkar did. Vaichalkar, who’s currently undecided on her major, interprets her poem as an exploration of ‘simpler times,’ where one could color anywhere they wanted instead of abiding by rigid adult guidelines.

Considering this was the first time the freshman performed at such an event, she admits she was initially “kind of terrified.” Vaichalkar notes that she loves poetry because “it’s a thinking space for me; if I ever have a problem I can write my thoughts down and spew my heart out.”

Dr. Nicole Pekarske is an English professor who was one of the five judges that decided the fate of the winners. Passionate about poetry herself, she was invited to be on the judging panel considering her experience with the art.

Dr. Pekarske noted how poems that stood out to her were ones that “take an emotional journey, in the sense that one moment a poem could be really serious while others could be humorous.”

Exploring difficult ideas also took preference with Pekarske, as she recalls one poet at the competition debated why “you can’t be whatever you want to be,” despite being told this cliche by many.

Michael Fallon, a retired English professor at UMBC, was another judge at the poetry reading, who mentioned “I love to hear young, enthusiastic poets read their work, it fills me with such joy.”

Fallon was picked to judge considering he has scored at many competitions prior, including the National Poetry Competition, Poetry Out Loud.

As for a winning poem, Fallon was on the look out for “work that pays attention to rhythm and sound, careful choice of words, and has illuminating imagery, that is read with conviction, and is about something that matters.”

“Being human is hard, and poetry allows us to express that at a deep level,” states Dr. Pekarske. Indeed, the Poetry Slam revealed the truth in this statement by allowing artists to express themselves through an emotional performance to portray their experiences as living beings.

For one night, the Performing Arts lobby was transformed into a safe space for poets to share their experiences with the campus community. 

The Walters Art Museum seeks enthusiastic and creative individuals to join our dynamic team of Museum Educators reporting to the Manager of Family Programs. Museum Educators facilitate programs at the museum and off-site, including but not limited to: family festivals, weekly drop-in art activities, birthday parties, scout workshops, early learning programs, interactive family tours, accessibility programs, and studio classes for pre k-12 students.

“The key to accelerating discoveries in science or the next tech breakthrough will be dependent on our ability to bring fresh perspectives to STEM fields,” says Priscilla Chan, co-founder of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI). Now, CZI has turned to UMBC for a model of how to make that happen.

CZI announced today that it has awarded $6.9 million to support a unique partnership to replicate UMBC’s Meyerhoff Scholars Program at UC San Diego and UC Berkeley.

“California’s openness to new ways of thinking is what has made this state an innovation engine for the world,” says Chan. “With these new grants, we hope to help bring even more diversity of perspective and experience to our state—and to Silicon Valley.”

The UMBC Meyerhoff program, founded in 1989, is recognized as one of the most effective models in the nation to help engage and retain underrepresented students pursuing undergraduate and graduate degrees in STEM fields. Program participants have already earned 300 Ph.D. degrees, 130 M.D. degrees, 54 M.D.-Ph.D. degrees, and 253 master’s degrees. Hundreds more are currently pursuing graduate degrees.

These achievements are particularly striking in a national context. UMBC graduates more African American students who go on to earn dual M.D.-Ph.D. degrees than any other college in the U.S.—a credit to the Meyerhoff program model. UMBC is also second in the nation when it comes to graduating African American students who go on to earn a Ph.D. in any STEM field.

A thrilling combination

“It is truly thrilling to think about the national and global impact the Meyerhoff Scholars Program will have through partnerships like this,” says Michael Summers, Robert E. Meyerhoff Chair for Excellence in Research and Mentoring and Distinguished University Professor at UMBC. “By working together we can help shape the future of our national Ph.D. pipeline, with inclusive excellence as a core shared value of our work.”

The University of California system is the largest undergraduate and graduate educator of underrepresented and low-income students in the country within the Association of American Universities, and UC Berkeley and UC San Diego are major sources of top talent for Silicon Valley and STEM fields more broadly.

The CZI support announced today will enable UC San Diego and UC Berkeley to apply many of the strategies successfully used at UMBC. These include outreach to high achieving underrepresented high school students, robust research experiences, team learning, peer counseling, intensive advising, preparation in the summer before matriculation, and engagement with students’ families.

Informed by UMBC’s own approach to measuring the impact of student support initiatives, UC San Diego and UC Berkeley will provide rigorous data to measure the effects of their new programs over the five-year grant period. In this way, they hope to determine what approaches work best to create a welcoming and supportive environment for underrepresented groups, and ultimately to improve education for all in STEM fields.

As UMBC recognizes, these findings can also help a university support students beyond STEM, in any field, as they work to discover and fulfill their potential.

Extending community

UMBC Meyerhoff alumni pursuing graduate degrees at UC Berkeley and UC San Diego are particularly excited to see this new partnership grow.

“Seeing a version of the program come to Berkeley is exciting because it means there is another initiative to increase the support for students of color. It means building and extending the community that wants to see us in academic spaces,” says Robyn Jasper ‘17, M25, biological sciences, who is currently a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley in plant and microbial biology.

“Being a Meyerhoff Scholar has connected me and continues to connect me with advocates for my personal growth and institutional change,” she shares.

Rockford “Rocky” Sison ‘13, M21, mathematics, a current Ph.D. candidate in applied mathematics at Berkeley, feels similarly. “As an alum of the Meyerhoff Scholars Program, I’m so excited to see other programs spring up across the country,” they share. “It means a lot to me that more students will receive the type of financial, professional, and emotional support I received as an undergraduate. Ideally, every student would get this level of support.”

For Sison, “being a Meyerhoff Scholar meant that I hit the ground running in college.” The Summer Bridge program before their first year and subsequent programming meant “I knew what internships were, office hours weren’t as scary because I knew a couple faculty members, and I was friends with a bunch of people that would also be in my classes.”

Sison carries on that legacy of support, sharing, “When I graduated from UMBC, being a Meyerhoff Scholar meant that I was dedicated to paying it forward, and I had a sprawling network of people with the same commitment.”

Now, UMBC’s Meyerhoff Scholars Program model will reach more people than ever before, reshaping the future of STEM in California and the nation, and unlocking new opportunities for students.

Featured image: Naomi Mburu ’18, chemical engineering, a Meyerhoff Scholar and UMBC’s first Rhodes Scholar. She is now studying nuclear engineering at Oxford. All photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Colorful mantis shrimps and freshwater darter fish took the spotlight at the recent annual meeting of the Society for Integrative Biology (SICB) in Tampa, Florida. UMBC biological sciences Ph.D. candidates Ricky Patel, Alice Chou, and Natalie Roberts, who study these intriguing creatures, earned four of the top student prizes awarded at the meeting, bringing well-earned attention to their own research and UMBC’s strong graduate programs.

Patel received the best student paper award for the Division of Neurobiology, Neuroethology, and Sensory Biology, and the best student oral presentation award from The Crustacean Society. Roberts was a finalist for the best student paper award for the Division of Animal Behavior. Chou received an honorable mention for the best student oral presentation from The Crustacean Society.

Quirky critters

Chou and Patel are studying mantis shrimp—small, colorful crustaceans that are “usually famous for two reasons: their very complex visual system and their very ballistic strike,” says Chou.

Patel is figuring out how mantis shrimp navigate to and from holes they call home. His inventive project has shown that at any point in time, a mantis shrimp can measure the most direct path back to its starting location—a skill humans can’t claim.

Chou is learning more about a region of the mantis shrimp brain called the central complex, which combines sensory information to help the animal decide what to do next. While much of the mantis shrimp changes drastically as it develops “from a weird little scrunchy larva to a big punching adult,” Chou recently discovered that one part of the central complex doesn’t change much at all. Now she’s asking why.

Roberts studies freshwater fish called darters. It’s common for multiple darter species to live in the same area, leading evolutionary biologists like Tamra Mendelson, professor of biological sciences, to wonder how they prevent interbreeding. Scientists had long assumed that female choice was the dominant driver, but Roberts and other students in Mendelson’s lab have shown that males are “probably much more important than we anticipated” in preventing interbreeding, Roberts says.

Independent thought

Chou and Patel both work closely with Tom Cronin, professor of biological sciences, and greatly value his approach to mentorship—encouraging them to take ownership over their work and pursue the questions that drive their passion for research. “My main philosophy is if graduate students are going to be successful career scientists, then they need to be able to work without a lot of direction,” Cronin says.

That attitude “fosters incredible independence,” says Patel. “I think we’re pretty strong at this point,” he adds, “because we had to work hard to establish exactly what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it.”

Giving his students the freedom to explore their interests and choose a thesis project independently sometimes means they choose topics outside Cronin’s own wheelhouse, as in Chou’s case. Even so, she says, “He’s been trying as hard as he can to get me the resources I need to answer the questions I want to ask.”

Mendelson, too, works to ensure her graduate students leave her lab as confident and experienced independent researchers. “That’s my biggest goal,” she says.

Roberts can vouch for that. “Tamra was really open to me trying techniques that she wasn’t as familiar with herself,” she says. And when Roberts has a gut feeling about which direction to take her work, Mendelson trusts her to run with it. “Her confidence in my skills and my intuition for what I’m doing has been really helpful,” Roberts reflects.

Grateful for guidance

Paired with that freedom is a level of support that helps Cronin and Mendelson’s students build compelling research projects and enhance their communication skills, which can lead to awards from big events like SICB.

“I feel like one of the reasons that we do well in the student competitions is that we have mentors who are giving us constructive feedback,” says Roberts. All three Ph.D. students expressed gratitude for the support they’ve received in preparing for presentations, from their first research talk to today.

Plus, Roberts adds, Mendelson and Cronin “help us design research questions that don’t overlap with what’s already being done. They’re cutting edge.”

“I’m happy to sit down with them constantly,” says Cronin, whether it’s to talk about their research progress or help them sort out more personal challenges. Mendelson, too, is there for her students, in the classroom and in the field. When Roberts was struggling to collect fish for her experiments, “She and I together went out into the stream,” Roberts remembers.

Community of support

Beyond the individual relationships Patel, Chou, and Roberts enjoy with Cronin and Mendelson, they also support each other. “The grad student community here, especially in our cohort, is very close,” says Chou, “and whenever we go to conferences we feel well-represented and supported in the audience of our talks.”

In preparation for SICB, Cronin shares that the students “all supported each other and each one of them made the other ones better.”

While his mentorship style focuses on independent thought, Cronin also thinks of science as a team sport. “My lab is very much a culture of people who work together,” he says. “We all want to rise together so all the boats are floating. That’s the kind of science I believe in.”

That collegiality benefits scientific progress. “We get a lot more done together than any one person could, and it’s non-linear,” Mendelson says. “The more people you have in the lab, you exponentially grow in productivity, and thinking, and directions you could go.”

Every person in the lab brings something unique to the mix. “From each of my students,” Mendelson shares, “I have found at least one unique characteristic that I admire and try to incorporate into my own work ethic.”

At SICB, says Chou, “You often see graduate students presenting their work right alongside high-flying lead investigators.” With the support they’ve received to pursue innovative research, and the recognition they’ve earned, Chou and her fellow Ph.D. candidates are already seeing themselves as that next generation of leaders.

Banner image: A peacock mantis shrimp. Photo by Bernard Dupont, used under creative commons BY-SA 2.0 license.

UMBC Mock Trial has finished the most successful season in its eight-year history, placing eighth at the American Mock Trial Association National Championship Tournament in Philadelphia. This impressive ranking concludes a season where over 750 teams competed across the nation. Sophomore Sydney Gaskins received the All-American Attorney Award, the highest individual honor in college mock trial.

The team swept Penn State in the first round and tied with University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University in the second and third rounds, respectively. In the fourth round, UMBC fought Yale University, the eventual champion, to a draw, narrowly missing advancing to the final round.

Each round highlighted the team’s preparation and allowed for individuals to demonstrate expertise gained over a rigorous season. “I am so honored to make my community proud and represent not only our program but UMBC as a whole in such a positive way,” says Gaskins.

UMBC’s leading Mock Trial A-Team includes Gaskins, ’21, political science; Linnea Collins ’21, global studies; Thomas Kiley ’21, chemistry; Ethan Hudson ’21, English; Natalie Murray ’21, biological sciences; Nihir Nanavaty ’19, political science; Thomas Azari ‘21, individualized study, and Amrita Sarma ‘22, psychology. The team also included four non-competing alternates: Lauren Wotring ‘22, political science; Amanda Hampton ‘22, biological science; Wendy Zhang ‘22, economics and psychology; and Kaitlyn Kauffman ’20, political science.

“In addition to earning an All-American Award at Nationals, Sydney earned two attorney awards at the national Opening Round Championship in 2019,” explains head coach Ben Garmoe, who also coached the first UMBC team to compete at nationals two years ago. “I lost count of how many coaches came up to me after the round and marveled at how Sydney is one of the greatest competitors they’ve ever seen. I am extremely proud of her and the team.”

Building success together

The UMBC Mock Trial program began in 2011. Ben Garmoe ’13, political science, a litigation attorney in Baltimore, co-founded the intellectual sports team with Travis Bell ’14, psychology and political science, a public defender in Alabama. Throughout the years the program’s success has drawn highly diverse, skilled, and committed student scholars, some of whom, like Garmoe, return as coaches during or after law school.

Current coaches include Summer Akhtar ’18, financial economics and political science; Dylan Elliott ’17, history; and Kayla Smith ’17, interdisciplinary studies, all members of the first UMBC Mock Trial team to go to nationals in 2017. Additional alumni coaches are Bell; Zachary Garmoe ’17, environmental studies; Jaedon Huie ’18, financial economics; and Cheyenne Smith ’16, biological sciences and psychology. Whitney Whilder, an attorney at Bodey law firm in Baltimore City, also supports the team as a coach.

“As a competitor, qualifying for Nationals for the first time was incredible. UMBC Mock Trial was the underdog,” recalls Akhtar, now a student at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. “That is no longer the case. As a coach, I am proud to see how students built a name for themselves as a formidable team competing and winning against the very best.”

Learning to manage challenges

For some A-Team members, the road to Philly began before UMBC. Hudson, Kiley, and Gaskins joined Mock Trial at Franklin High School. Hudson helped his team finish second out of over 120 teams in the 2016 state championship. He joined UMBC’s B-Team his freshman year and watched the A- team compete in Nationals in 2017. The following year Hudson earned a spot on the A-Team, and he was elected president two years later.

Mock Trial, for Hudson, is about following his dreams while managing severe anxiety. He says that his family, his teammates, and Garmoe have helped him to learn to manage his anxiety. “I take my victories where I can get them, day by day,” shares Hudson. “A win for me means being able to give a statement without twitches or body movements, or approaching someone whom I have anxiety to speak with.”

His hard work has paid off tremendously. In addition to developing coping strategies and gaining confidence, he’s also been honored for his work on the team with an All-Region Attorney award at the 2019 regional competition.

Hudson also now shares his strategies with his teammates and his students as a coach for three high school Mock Trial teams. He plans to follow in Garmoe and Akhtar’s footsteps and give back to UMBC as a coach after law school.

Mock Trial also helped Gaskins persevere through difficult times in high school and college, and instilled in her a desire to be a lawyer. “I found my voice in high school mock trial when I felt I had nowhere to turn,” says Gaskins. “College mock trial is much harder. It helped me strengthen my voice as a self-assured woman and speak up against society’s biases about how women should act.”

As Gaskins has gained confidence through the years, she has learned to enjoy and observe the impact of her performance, and to make calculated adjustments throughout the process.

“For me, this is like Division I sports,” Gaskins explains. “It’s extremely rigorous and competitive. Mock Trial demands a great deal of hard work, dedication, and commitment, to compete against some of the best teams and win. I always aim to win.”

Banner image: UMBC Mock Trial A-Team at AMTA 2019. All images courtesy of UMBC Mock Trial unless otherwise indicated.

The Louis L. Kaplan Scholarship Fund was established in 1977 by the University of Maryland Baltimore County Student Government Association in recognition of Dr. Kaplan’s many contributions to UMBC during his tenure as Interim Chancellor.

It was Dr. Kaplan’s wish, when the fund was first established, that students who displayed academic promise be assisted financially in order to continue their education at UMBC.

These guidelines set forth the conditions for the award of the scholarships which will honor Dr. Louis L. Kaplan and carry out his wishes.

1. NAME: The name of the Fund shall be: The Louis Kaplan Scholarship Fund

2. FUNDING: Income from the Louis L. Kaplan Scholarship Fund that has been established in the Common Trust Fund of the University will be treated as a permanent endowment, the principal and any unexpended income to be invested and reinvested under the authority of the University System of Maryland Board of Regents. Contributions may be added to the original principal of the Louis L. Kaplan Fund as part of the endowment. The income from the scholarship fund shall be administered by the Office of Institutional Advancement.

3. AWARDS: A Louis L. Kaplan Scholarship(s) may be awarded to outstanding undergraduate students at the University of Maryland Baltimore County each year.

Amount of Awards: The amount of the awards (s) will be based on the interest earned annually on the principal in the fund account; half the interest earned each year will be available for distribution.

Criteria for Selection: The purpose of the award is to recognize UMBC students with proven academic achievement (minimum 3.0 grade point average) who will hold junior or senior status (minimum 60 credits) the following fall (credits must reflect on transcript by the end of the application semester), demonstrate financial need, and have made valuable contributions to the UMBC community. While financial need will be a consideration, it WILL NOT be the deciding factor in granting the award (s).

Nomination and Award Process: Applications should be submitted to the Vice President for Student Affairs office. Selection of a student or students for the award will be made by the selection committee by June 15 each year; the award will be presented for the following fall semester by the first week in October.

2019 Kaplan Scholarship Application