A UMBC faculty member and a UMBC alumnus were recognized by the Maryland Science Center for their outstanding work in engineering and science. Lee Blaney, associate professor of chemical, biochemical and environmental engineering, was one of two people to receive the 2017 Outstanding Young Engineer Award, and Phillip Graff ’08, physics, was awarded one of two 2017 Outstanding Young Scientist Awards. The ceremony, hosted annually by the Maryland Science Center and the Maryland Academy of Sciences, highlights the work being done by young scientists and engineers in Maryland to advance the fields.

In his work, Blaney develops technology used to recover nutrients, such as phosphorus, from poultry litter. The phosphorus found in poultry litter often saturates the soil on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, making the water that runs off into the Chesapeake Bay a hazard for aquatic life. The technology he is testing in his lab could reduce the amount of phosphorus that ends up in the Chesapeake Bay from manure by about 90 percent.

“I was extremely delighted to receive the 2017 Maryland Outstanding Young Engineer Award. Of course, this award reflects a much larger team, and I would like to acknowledge my graduate and undergraduate research assistants for their hard work in the laboratory. This award is theirs as much as mine,” Blaney says. “Much of our research focuses on environmental issues in Maryland and the Chesapeake Bay watershed, and so it was a particular honor to be recognized by the Maryland Academy of Sciences. One of my mentors likes to say that every award comes with a great responsibility to live up to the associated expectations. So, we are looking forward to continuing our research to ensure environmental quality in the Chesapeake Bay watershed for the coming decades.”

Earlier this year, Blaney received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation to address contaminants of emerging concern, from personal care products and pharmaceuticals, found in the Gwynns Falls watershed.

“Dr. Blaney is a dedicated professor with unique and innovative research ideas. He is a great mentor who encourages his students to think about research problems from multiple angles and asks tough questions to push us to reach for the best solution,” says Mamatha Hopanna, Ph.D. ‘22, environmental engineering, who works in Blaney’s lab.

Blaney is the faculty advisor of the UMBC’s Engineers Without Borders student organization. He has led several trips to Kenya, where he and his students developed a clean-water supply for a village with a population of 500.

Graff currently works as a data scientist and astrophysicist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Baltimore. He has industry experience in many fields including cybersecurity. Previously, he worked at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and helped develop an algorithm for the Laser Interferometry Gravitational Wave Observatory. He has also developed algorithms to protect the nation’s computer networks for the Department of Homeland Security National Cyber Protection System.

The Outstanding Young Scientist Award and Outstanding Young Engineer Award have been presented each year since 1959 and 1988, respectively. To be eligible for the award, nominees must be 35 or younger if working in academic settings, or younger than 40, if working in industry.

Banner image: Lee Blaney. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC. Videos courtesy of the Maryland Science Center.

UMBC’s George Karabatis, associate professor of information systems, and Ahmed AlEroud M.S. ‘12, information systems, Ph.D. ‘14, information systems, recently launched the cybersecurity startup Cyves through $150,000 in grant funding from TEDCO, an organization create by the Maryland State Legislature to support tech entrepreneurship, and an investment from InnovativeTech Ventures, led by Gerard Eldering.

George Karabatis, center, with Gerard Eldering and Wendy Martin at the signing.

With the launch of the company, Karabatis and AlEroud enter phase three of TEDCO’s tech commercialization process, after completing robust market analysis and business planning to ensure a solid launch (in part through AlEroud’s dissertation research). Phase three will focus on commercializing the research, hiring officers and employees to run the company, and refining the technology behind Cyves’s cybersecurity product.

“This work is important because it reveals a new way of identifying incoming cyber attacks and actually stopping them, based on intrinsic features of the attacks and how these features correlate with each other,” says Karabatis. “In addition, this research is capable of identifying not only well-known attacks, but most importantly unknown attacks that have not been identified yet.”

Karabatis explains that the Cyves technology detects cyber attacks by analyzing characteristics of these intrusions at a high level, and comparing them with incoming traffic. By relying on semantic and contextual information, the Cyves technology is able to analyze existing attacks and behaviors and extrapolate findings that can be used to identify patterns and flag future attacks quickly after they occur. This approach to detecting cyber attacks not only identifies possible intrusions, but also reduces the number of false alarms that are raised.

In testing, Karabatis says, the technology accurately identified not only known cyber attacks, but also 90% of unknown (0-day) attacks that previously would have likely gone unnoticed. Identifying such attacks can play a significant role in protecting sensitive information like social security numbers, credit card numbers, and birthdates, stored in vulnerable databases.

“Technology transfer is just one piece of the continuum of support that is needed to advance new concepts developed by our researchers. Investment in research projects that have commercial potential, assistance in obtaining state proof-of-concept funding, and access to business incubation and mentoring all play a part,” says Wendy Martin, director of the office technology development. “We encourage entrepreneurial researchers, like George Karabatis, to start their own companies, so they can continue their involvement in bringing their innovations to the marketplace.”

UMBC’s Weihong Lin is helping to close a major gap in knowledge about e-cigarettes, with a focus on flavorings. The National Institute for Drug Abuse has awarded Lin, associate professor of biological sciences, a two-year, approximately $400,000 grant to supply much-needed objective data that can help inform regulation of flavorings in electronic cigarettes and protect the consumers of today and tomorrow, especially children and teens.

The dangers of nicotine are fairly well understood, but today’s e-cigarettes also include ingredients that are not well known. “A primary concern about e-cigarettes right now is that they use a huge number of flavoring components,” says Lin. A 2014 study found that 460 e-cigarette brands used 7,760 different flavorings. It also connected “e-juice” flavors—from “cotton candy” to “double chocolate”—to a rise in e-cigarette use by young people.

Scents and flavorings “tap into our mood and our motivation,” Lin explains. She also notes that the feelings that come along with scents and flavors can actually pose challenges to doing research on the safety of e-cigarettes.

The positive emotional associations people have with certain aromas and tastes, like eating cotton candy at an amusement park or coming home to the smell of chocolate brownies in the oven, can override the warning sensations caused by high levels of artificial flavorings or nicotine, says Lin. This means that asking people about irritation levels in their mouths and throats after using e-cigarette products with familiar or pleasant tastes may not provide an accurate picture of e-cigarettes’ actual negative effects.

E-cigarettes usually include a heating coil, solvents, nicotine, and flavoring components, all of which reach extremely high temperatures during the device’s vaporization process. Even if flavorings are considered safe for food products, they can be irritating when inhaled at higher levels. Plus, the extreme heat could change the components’ chemical make-up and convert benign substances into toxic ones. “But if you have the flavoring to mask physical irritation,” says Lin, “it becomes a more tolerable or pleasurable experience.”

To push past that mask, Lin will go to a deeper sensory level, with the help of sensory systems in mice’s nasal passages, which are responsible for the sense of smell and detecting airway irritation.

Lin’s lab will explore how specific sensory systems that detect irritation respond in the presence of e-cigarette flavorings. “It’s an objective way to measure to what degree the e-juice will activate this system,” explains Lin. “We’re asking, ‘At what level will these flavorings cause an acute, irritating sensation?’”

Lin’s group will study popular flavors used in various electronic cigarette liquid brands. The results could inform future regulations on chemicals used as e-cigarette flavorings. Lin hopes to eventually extend this work to also explore the longer-term effects of low-dose exposure to these chemicals.

As a neurobiologist, Lin says, “I’ve always been curious about how chemicals affect humans’ daily choices,” from the foods we eat to the people we choose to date. But this current research project is also personally meaningful for her, as a teacher of young people.

“You see so many young kids experimenting with e-cigarettes, and they don’t necessarily know the harm,” says Lin. “If we can give them a science-based warning and help protect them from respiratory illnesses and nicotine addition, it’s going to be good for science and for society.”

UMBC is one of three leading academic institutions collaborating on a new research initiative focused on cybersecurity for critical national infrastructures, including information technology, public transit, and financial services. University leaders signed the three-nation agreement in a ceremony at the sixth International Cybersecurity Symposium in Japan.

UMBC, Keio Research Institute (KRIS) in Japan, and Royal Holloway University of London (RHUL) in the UK will partner to investigate the use of common system simulation tools for modeling critical national infrastructure. This partnership is part of a broader international collaboration, the International Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (INCS-COE). It will also involve Hitachi, an international operator in power systems, telecommunication, railways, and other core infrastructure areas.

Because cybersecurity attacks may not be limited to national borders, this collaboration argues that defense against such attacks should not be siloed either.

“Cybersecurity can no longer be treated as a national issue,” emphasizes Karl V. Steiner, vice president for research at UMBC. “Long-term and productive international collaborations are needed to make significant progress.”

Jun Murai, professor of environment and information studies at Keio University, notes, “We look forward to working with our research colleagues in the UK and U.S. to help address the increasingly challenging cyber threats to the security of our respective critical national infrastructures.”

Working with a common toolset will enable mixed nationality teams to run simulations together. This will help cybersecurity experts learn how to more effectively address human factors, including cultural differences, in predicting how attacks and responses to those attacks might play out across different geographies.

“We are excited to participate in this new research collaboration with our colleagues in Japan and the UK to help us better understand and address some of the key cybersecurity challenges that our nations face from increasingly aggressive international adversaries,” says Anupam Joshi, director of UMBC’s Center for Cybersecurity.

The partners in this research see the modeling of system security as increasingly vital for industry and government, for both training purposes and vulnerability analysis.

“This initiative creates many future opportunities including, for example, the opportunity to address the impact on critical national infrastructure security of the exponential growth of the internet of things, and for potential exchanges of expert staff and students,” explains Keith Mayes, head of the Information Security Group (ISG) at Royal Holloway University.

Steiner shares Mayes’s excitement about expanding opportunities for both established and emerging researchers in this growing field. Thanks to leading academic programs in cybersecurity, the bwtech@UMBC Cyber Incubator, and UMBC’s internationally-known Center for Cybersecurity, he says, “UMBC is uniquely positioned in Maryland to become a major global force for research in cybersecurity.”

“This partnership,” says Steiner, “builds important connections to move this essential work forward.”

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On June 12, leaders from UMBC and the University of Limpopo in South Africa formalized commitments to collaborate through joint research as well as faculty and student exchanges. UMBC has steadily grown its international partnerships with universities in Germany, Japan, Portugal, Peru, and other nations around the globe. This is the first such agreement between UMBC and a university in Africa.

“It gives us a lot of joy…to be the first African university with which you sign an agreement like this,” shared Jesika Singh, deputy vice chancellor for research, innovation and partnership at University of Limpopo. “There is so much potential that we see.”

This relationship grew out of the African International Conference (AIC) on Statistics, an event organized annually since 2014 by UMBC statistics faculty and international partners. Past conferences have occurred in Senegal, Ethiopia, Cameroon, South Africa, and Botswana, including statisticians from all across Africa as well as a dozen U.S. institutions. The next two conferences will take place in Ethiopia and Morocco.

Yehenew Kifle, associate professor at the University of Limpopo and currently visiting faculty at UMBC, first connected with UMBC during the 2015 AIC at Jimma University in Ethiopia. Inspired to build on the success of the conference, Kifle asked UMBC to partner on a grant from the South African government to support faculty development.

The grant, managed by Professor Kingsley Ayisi, calls for University of Limpopo junior faculty, some of whom do not yet hold doctoral degrees, to travel to UMBC to pursue doctoral-level training in statistics. Through a similar agreement, other Limpopo faculty will travel to Iowa State University for agricultural training.

“This is really a milestone for us,” said Bimal Sinha, professor of statistics at UMBC and a leader in organizing the AIC, at the signing. “I hope that once other African universities see this, they will want to participate as well.”

In addition to Limpopo faculty traveling to UMBC, UMBC faculty will travel to South Africa to provide short training courses in statistical methods. Those courses will specifically focus on how statistics are used in the study of climate and climate change, which is already producing severe effects throughout the African continent.

Beyond the statistics training program, the partners also signed an agreement outlining plans to pursue joint research projects, exchange programs for UMBC and Limpopo students, and other collaborations across a wide range of departments and programs.

“The way I see it, all sides have quite a bit to gain from this collaboration,” said Rouben Rostamian, professor and chair of mathematics and statistics at UMBC.

“This agreement goes far beyond statistics,” said Antonio Moreira, UMBC’s vice provost for academic affairs. “We are using education between our two countries and our two young universities—both less than 60 years old—to truly change the world by educating, training, and cultivating the future.”

William LaCourse, dean of the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences at UMBC, is equally excited for the partnership. He shared, “We’re very proud to be here on this joint venture and to take this journey with you.”

Singh echoed his feeling. What started as a small gathering of colleagues from two continents, she said, “has very quickly developed into something that we can look forward to for many years to come.”

How does unequal access to health care affect the lives and experiences of people from different communities across Baltimore and the nation? UMBC’s Public Humanities and Health Justice Research Forum addressed this question through remarks and conversations with researchers from UMBC’s College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (CAHSS), College of Engineering and Information Technology (COEIT), and College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences (CNMS), as well as Johns Hopkins University, Morgan State University, Coppin State University, and Columbia University.

The forum was the fourth in a series organized by UMBC’s Office of the Vice President for Research to bring together faculty tackling shared topics from widely diverse angles. “We established the research forum series in 2014 to provide an opportunity for scientists and scholars to collaboratively explore multiple facets of a topic central to the research and scholarship of UMBC,” says Karl Steiner, vice president for research. Previous forum focus areas include high-performance computing, climate change and the environment, and the visualization of science.

UMBC’s Dresher Center for the Humanities sponsored and helped organize the latest forum, focused on how the humanities can help address challenges related to health care access. Dresher Center Director Jessica Berman shared, “It was exciting to see how much humanistic scholarship is taking place all across campus and the potential partnerships it creates, between UMBC and other universities. This research forum helped to highlight the humanities in their capacity not only to ask good questions but also to help solve important problems such as health justice and access.”

Racism in Health Care Policy

Keynote speaker Graham Mooney, professor in the Institute of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, presented his research on the Baltimore Medical Care Plan of 1948. “By using the history of medicine and public policy we can better understand how the process of racism and segregation have interacted to prevent black residents’ access to quality medical care in Baltimore,” explained Mooney.

The topic led to an interactive conversation about the negative impact the 1948 plan had on the quality of life of Baltimore’s black community and how it served as a model for similar approaches in other states, and later for Medicare and Medicaid. During the discussion, Shawn Bediako, associate professor of psychology, argued that analyses of health care access across U.S. history should also include how black communities have responded to inequities. He mentioned, as examples, the establishment of the National Negro Health Movement and Office of Negro Health Work.

Listening to Communities

Valuing community voices was a key theme in the two interdisciplinary panel discussions that followed. These discussions revealed how key humanities methods, such as attending to history, paying attention to narrative—including who gets to speak and when—and thinking critically about how we understand and value specific human experiences can be crucial to addressing issues important to contemporary public life.

In the first of those panels, Kristen Slesar, from the Narrative Medicine Program at Columbia University, shared her experience using personal narratives to inform medical research. Slesar is a licensed clinical social worker and psychotherapist who focuses on child trauma. She regularly teaches about health care justice and health care for underserved communities.

Scott Casper, dean of the College of arts, humanities, and social sciences (CAHSS),  then moderated a discussion on “Listening as Public Practice: Towards Equity and Justice” that included Bediako as well as colleagues Drew Holladay, assistant professor of English; Amy Hurst, associate professor of information systems; and Denise Meringolo, associate professor of history. The panelists explored how centering the narratives of individuals in their research improves the quality of their findings and the potential impact of their work. “Confronting the barriers to health equity compels us to look across disciplines and toward collaborations among social scientists, scientists and engineers, and humanists and artists,” noted Casper. 

Lawrence Brown, assistant professor of community health and policy at Morgan State University, spoke during the second panel about the impacts of residential displacement and financial disinvestment on community health. In addition to his work on the impact of historical trauma on community health, he also leads the student-driven #BmoreLEADfree project focused on ending lead poisoning in Baltimore.

Berman then led a group discussion on the topic “Communication, the Urban Environment, and Health Justice,” with Dena Aufseeser, assistant professor of geography and environmental systems; Katherine Bankole-Medina, professor of history at Coppin State University; Dawn Biehler, associate professor of geography and environmental systems; and Jennifer Maher, associate professor of English. The discussion showed how paying attention to the ways local communities understand issues of health and the environment can challenge the kinds of changes we propose and the ways we communicate about them.

New Health Equity Collaborative

The forum also introduced UMBC’s new Collaborative for the Interdisciplinary Promotion of Health Equity Research (CIPHER). The collaborative will form working groups bringing together UMBC researchers across different fields to examine current challenges to health care equity, and to inform innovative solutions for the future.

Bediako, whose research focuses on health care inequities experienced by patients with sickle cell disease, will serve as the founding convener of this initiative. He shares, “I am most excited that CIPHER will aim to reach across disciplinary boundaries and use multiple perspectives to address specific challenges to health equity.”