UMBC CSEE student and alumna to attend Heidelberg Laureate Forum

A UMBC Ph.D. student and an alumna have been selected to participate in this year’s international Nobel laureate forums, which connect top student engineers and scientists from universities around the globe with the world’s leading scientific researchers.

Kavita Krishnaswamy ‘07, computer science and mathematics, and Ph.D. ‘18, computer science, will attend the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, and Naomi Mburu ‘18, chemical engineering, will attend the Lindau Nobel Laureate Forum. William Easley ‘13, information systems management, M.S. ‘15, human-centered computing, and Ph.D. ‘22, human-centered computing, was also nominated to participate in the Heidelberg Laureate Forum.

“These competitive events bring great minds, who have been recognized for outstanding scientific achievement, together with a new generation of scientists, who are considered to be among the top young minds from countries around the world,” explains Renetta Tull, associate vice provost for strategic initiatives. She is delighted to say, “This year, we have not one, but two students from UMBC who will receive this significant honor.”

Naomi Mburu. Photo by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Mburu, the first UMBC student to receive the Rhodes Scholarship, will attend the 68th Lindau Nobel Laureate meeting, June 24 – 29, in Lindau, Germany. The meeting brings approximately 500 undergraduate and Ph.D. students, and post-doctoral researchers together from around the globe to promote connections between scientists across generations, cultures, and disciplines. Each year the focus of the meeting changes to address topics including physiology, medicine, physics, and chemistry.

“I am beyond excited to be attending this meeting with 40+ Nobel laureates and brilliant students from around the world,” says Mburu. “There will be opportunities to both network and speak with the Nobel laureates, while celebrating different cultures and learning more about advances in medicine and physiology.”

In addition to her most recent honors, Mburu received a Goldwater Scholarship in 2016. She has also already conducted research at European Organization for Nuclear Research in Switzerland.

During the one-week-long Heidelberg Laureate Forum, Krishnaswamy will have the opportunity to connect and network with leaders in the fields of mathematics and computer science. The forum will be held at Heidelberg University in Germany, September 22 – 28.

Kavita Krishnaswamy. Photo by Britney Clause ’11.

Krishnaswamy is one of just 200 students from around the world selected to participate in the Heidelberg Laureate Forum. She shares, “I am very thankful for the opportunity to represent UMBC and help promote the public understanding of mathematics and computer science from the perspective of improving the quality of life for individuals with physical disabilities through the advancement of robotics.”

Krishnaswamy’s previous honors include being named a Microsoft Fellow and received the Google Lime Scholars in 2017, prestigious honors that recognize emerging scholars in computing who are dedicated to increasing diversity in the industry.

“At UMBC we think of our university as an institution committed to inclusive excellence that prepares students who can compete on a global scale,” Tull reflects. “Kavita and Naomi’s awards signify that others around the world agree.”

Adapted from a UMBC news article by Megan Hanks. Banner image: Nobel Prize. Photo by Flickr user Adam Baker under license CC BY 2.0.

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In an industry that rewards ingenuity and thrives on comradery, hard working UMBC alums are making their alma mater proud — one pint at a time.

by Seth Sawyers ’99

On a cold night in a converted Pigtown theater, Josey Schwartz ’11, interdisciplinary studies — one of two owners, brewers, bartenders, marketing managers, painters, and drywall hangers behind Suspended Brewing Company — wasn’t doing any of those jobs.

It was the end of a long day — one of many, many long days to come until they finally sold their first beer in their new home. With a low-key indie-rock mix as his only company, he was sweeping up.

“We’re everything,” Schwartz says, of the roles he and co-owner Yasmin Karimian ’11, political science, fill at their shop. “We’re the brewers, the bartenders, janitors, the taxmen. We don’t stop working. I’ve slept in the lab, voluntarily and involuntarily.”

Many of us enjoy beer; some would even say we love it. But for a remarkable group of UMBC graduates who consider beer more of a calling are devoting their professional lives to beer, and specifically to craft beer — complex, interesting, sometimes far-out beer.

They brew it, yes, but that’s just the start. They also research it, and study it, and market it, and sell it, and package it, and obsess about it. All of which means that, increasingly, that next six pack you take home or pint you sip just may have been made by someone who’s spent some time in, say, Patapsco Hall.

Oh, and they love it, too. These UMBC graduates love beer. They really, really love beer. “Beer is incredible,” says Schwartz. “I could go on and on forever about ‘why beer.’”

“You should be a professor,” says Karimian, half-joking, herself by day a contracts attorney with Amazon. As if either of them needed even one more thing to do.

Not Your Dad’s Beer

This writer is old enough to remember the days, not so long ago, when restaurants divided their beers into two categories: “domestic” or “imported.” Domestic meant Budweiser, Bud Light, Miller Light, maybe Michelob. Imported, slightly more expensive, meant Heineken, Amstel Light, maybe a Molson.

Those days are long over. Now, as anyone who’s drank a beer in the past 15 years knows, the types and brands of beer available are as head-spinningly diverse as the UMBC campus itself. There are clean, light Kolsch styles and, on the other end, dark stouts fortified with coffee or chocolate. In between are lightly bitter pale ales, medium-bitter India pale ales, very bitter double India pale ales, beers brewed with cherries or watermelon or raspberries, beer brewed with Old Bay.

And while macro beer isn’t going anywhere — two huge companies, Anheuser-Busch InBev and MillerCoors, still produce 90 percent of the beer for the western market — the number of craft breweries increased by 600 percent between 2008 and 2016. Today, there are about 7,000 breweries nationwide, the vast majority of which are small operations, each run by a handful of people, putting out a keg here or a six-pack there of beer that might be called Snow Pants or Trolley Problem or Mistakes Were Made, and which are as alike to a National Bohemian as Camden Yards is to the grassy field behind your parents’ house.

The Right Recipe

Some people know at freshman orientation what they want to do with their lives. UMBC’s beer-brewing contingent is the other way around: young, high performers who tried this, tried that, and ultimately figured out they could throw everything they’d learned into beer.

Twenty minutes southwest of Pigtown, in a Columbia industrial park, Zachary Michel ’09, spends his days figuring out how to let people know about another fledgling brewery. As Hysteria Brewing Company’s marketing manager, the Harford County native finds he’s able to draw upon his innate curiosity, a trait he feels was fostered by UMBC.

“I started out undeclared, then [studied] music for a bit, and I looked into journalism,” Michel says from Hysteria’s front room, a cozy space lined with shelves crammed with books and curated, antique gadgets. Eventually, a course called Environmental Science/Conservation with Professor Sandy Parker got him excited about geography. “He was so passionate and so knowledgeable that it just opened my eyes. UMBC totally opened my eyes to a lot of things. It allowed me to experience a little bit of everything.”

Michel, who one day might organize a cycling night, and the next work on can designs, among many other things, wound up a geography and environmental science major with an economics minor. “A direct line to brewing,” he jokes.

Listening to Michel is Jordan Baney, a partner at Hysteria, who has UMBC in his blood although a call to serve in the Army cut his days as an economics major short. He grew up in part in Arbutus, within earshot of Retriever lacrosse games. As a kid, he swam in the campus’s indoor pool and his uncle Tony makes and maintains glass instruments for the chemistry department to this day. Baney says that anyone getting into something like beer, which encompasses both business and culture, would benefit from a wide-ranging college experience.

“There’s this idea out there that [students] should be focusing more on one thing and doing less general education,” he says. “And I totally disagree. Unless we’re robots meant to work in one thing for the rest of our lives, which I don’t think we are. All of us benefit from knowing a little bit of history. All of us benefit from knowing a little bit of calculus.”

You can’t help but notice that it’s a group interested in things beyond beer. Karimian, of Suspended Brewing, was an SGA President who is deeply committed to community engagement, the environment, and social justice. She helped write a history of UMBC, went to law school, became a lawyer, and now co-owns a brewpub. Schwartz, Karimian’s partner in life and an Interdisciplinary Studies major, wrestled for UMBC’s club team and went on to business school at Stanford before deciding he wanted to make beer. A writer and theatre buff, Michel is a founder of the Charm City Fringe Festival. Baney served in Afghanistan as a staff sergeant in charge of logistics, getting food and ammunition and gear to where it needed to be.

Still, if beer itself is part chemistry and part biology, then some UMBC alumni are nothing if not ringers. Halethorpe-based Heavy Seas Beer and Baltimore-based Union Craft Brewing are two of the region’s bigger craft beer makers and it’s for the latter that Lynn Pronobis ’13, chemistry, has graduated from intern (she was the first hire by Union’s three founders) to brewer, to head of brewing operations, which means she oversees all things involving the actual brewing of the beer.

“It’s mentally and physically challenging, and you’re a part of the team, and I don’t have to walk into a cubicle every day,” says the former outfielder for UMBC’s softball team. “And we’re all fighting against the big guys.”

Small Batch, Small World

Brewing’s a small world, especially in a city nicknamed “Smalltimore.” Though UMBC’s brewing alumni didn’t all know each other while at UMBC, they certainly know each other now. That’s partly due to the growing Baltimore-DC-Maryland alumni network of a school that’s now 50 years old, but partly due to people like Brian Arnold ’05, English.

Arnold taught high school English in Baltimore City Public Schools for several years before he realized he needed a career change. Like many who wind up in craft beer, he began by brewing at home, which led to the 2013 opening of Nepenthe Homebrew, a kind of spiritual base for the region’s serious amateurs and professionals alike. Currently based in the Woodberry neighborhood of Baltimore, but set to move to a former meatpacking facility in Hampden, Nepenthe sells the raw goods of brewing: tanks, tubes, grains, hops.

“It’s awesome,” Arnold says of Baltimore’s brewing community. “I think we know, more or less, everybody in it. Quite a few stop in when they need something. We all know each other and help each other out.”

None seem concerned about having too many craft breweries — and there’s little in the way of the type of competition you might find with other types of business. “What’s there to fight about?” asks Schwartz. “We’re all drinking each other’s beer. We’re asking, how’d you work with dried fruit to extract this much color? Do you do a slurry or just drop in dry hops through the port?”

Flavor Innovators

For young people with such varied interests, such deep-seated curiosity, it’s no wonder they found themselves in an industry that rewards, and demands, near constant tinkering. Consider the kinds of beers they’re making, just at Hysteria alone: at least three kinds of IPAs, a barleywine that’s 11 percent alcohol, a “sour cherry Belgian Tripel” called Monasterium.

“Our mission is to push the boundaries,” says Hysteria’s Michel. “There’s no reason you can’t do an IPA in a gin barrel. Or a porter in a red wine barrel.”

Schwartz says he’s been thinking of “an American kettle sour using the same bacteria that’s in yogurt and then fruit added from Iran. Barberries. We get to talk about barberries, which are a staple of western Asia, in Iranian kitchens. We’re working on one beer but made seven different ways, with seven different yeast strains. There are so many variables. It’s not arithmetical, it’s logarithmic.”

While newer brewpubs like Hysteria and Suspended are focused on making new beers, more established breweries such as Union and DC’s Atlas Brew Works are at a slightly different place, business-wise. For Atlas, Sean Palmateer ’16, biochemistry and molecular biology, shows up to work at 4 a.m. and spends a lot of his time as a brewer on perfecting established, flagship beers.

Palmateer, who lives in Mount Vernon, has often helped out at Suspended, stopping by after work or on days off to help as they’ve worked to build their business. His enthusiasm for the nuts-andbolts of the industry, the actual brewing of beer, is sharp, as is Schwartz’s. These are two people who think about beer often, and deeply.

“I think about Sixpoint Brewery, whose motto is ‘Beer is culture,’” Palmateer says. “You look back at history and that’s how people delineate who they are. I’m interested in a lot of beer history. It encompasses history and science and philosophy in really interesting ways. And you can kind of get into it and take it any way you want to.”

And as long as the interest is there from the brewers — and their eventual customers — the sky seems to be the limit.

“I just saw there was a broker selling soy-sauce barrels,” Schwartz says, before sipping one of his sours. “And some brewer’s gonna figure out how to make a delicious beer out of it.”

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For years, UMBC students have made a mark at the highest academic levels, winning many of the top prestigious scholarships available. With the assistance of staff and faculty in the Honors College, students from every discipline have impressed the judges with their subject expertise and broad world outlook. Here’s a quick look at some of our more than a hundred past student winners of prestigious scholarships.

Gates Cambridge Scholarship

Ian M. Ralby ’02, modern languages and linguistics, and M.A. ’02, intercultural communication, founder and CEO of the international consulting firm I.R. Consilium, is one of four UMBC winners of the Gates Cambridge. Even after completing a law degree at William and Mary and his M.Phil. and Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge, Dr. Ralby still regards the education he received at UMBC as “unequivocally first rate and world class.

Marshall Scholarship

Loren Siebert ’93, computer science, earned his master’s in computer science at the University of Manchester and did research on technology policy at the London School of Economics. His master’s research earned him a mention in The Economist and in New Scientist in the same week. He later developed LinguaStep, software that is used in Arabic language programs at over 30 different universities.

Truman Scholarship

Alicia L. Wilson ’04, political science, dreamed of becoming a lawyer since the age of 15. After graduating from UMBC, she earned her law degree from the University of Maryland School of Law. She is now Senior Vice President of Impact Investments and Senior Legal Counsel for Plank Industries.

Goldwater Scholarship

Daniel Ocasio ’17, chemical engineering, was a Meyerhoff Scholar, MARC U*STAR Scholar, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Scholar, and member of the Honors College at UMBC. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, where his research focuses on developing improved water treatment techniques and technologies.

Fulbright Scholarship

Jacqueline Wojcik ’17, visual arts, took an interdisciplinary approach to their research, combining animation, computer science, and history. They have spent the last academic year at the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo, Norway, exploring the role of game development in visualization, learning, and connecting people with history by modeling interactive environments based on the Gokstad ship.

Read more about UMBC’s very first Rhodes Scholar here.

Thousands of Retriever graduates, family, and friends streamed into the new UMBC Event Center last week to celebrate spring commencement, as the ceremonies returned to Hilltop Circle for the first time in two decades. The new arena quickly filled with crowds of cheering supporters, with more tuning in to UMBC’s live webcasts from around the globe.

The graduate commencement ceremony, for students earning master’s and doctoral degrees, took place on Wednesday, May 23. The ceremony included remarks by honorary degree recipient Erin O’Shea, the first female president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI).

O’Shea reflected on the tremendous promise of UMBC’s graduates as leaders of tomorrow, telling graduates:

As I look around this room, I see a lot of powerful individuals. I see individuals who are true to themselves. I see individuals who will have a seat at the table and who will pull up a chair for others. I see individuals who will listen and be heard. I see individuals moving towards greatness.

UMBC hosted two undergraduate ceremonies on Thursday, May 24, including a morning commencement for the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, School of Social Work, and Erickson School, and an afternoon ceremony for the College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences, College of Engineering and Information Technology, and Interdisciplinary Studies.

Kara Seidel ’18, psychology, valedictorian of the morning ceremony, shared her family’s deep connection to UMBC, where her parents and brother also earned their degrees. She reflected that, initially, she was uncertain about whether she could create her own unique path at the university. But once she stepped onto campus, she joked, “the UMBC community sucked me in,” and her college career was full speed ahead.

While studying at UMBC, Seidel accessed opportunities to work in the Trauma Lab of Christopher Murphy, professor and chair of psychology; in an HIV/addiction lab at Johns Hopkins; and at the American Psychological Association. These experiences helped her identify her core interest in the field of psychology: supporting families dealing with trauma.

The people of UMBC have also had a lasting impact on Seidel. She reflected, “We have had the opportunity to learn, not just in the classroom, but as members of a diverse, civic-minded community.”

Honorary degree recipient Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, addressed graduates in the morning ceremony. “Achieving excellence, no matter what your background, that’s the greatest victory of all,” he reflected. He also brought some levity to the festivities in recalling UMBC’s history-making NCAA victory, joking that UMBC helped advance his bracket because he chose his winning teams based on academic reputation.

Valedictorian Eudorah Vital ’18, biochemistry and molecular biology, addressed her classmates during the afternoon undergraduate commencement ceremony. “There are three things from our UMBC experience that I believe we can all carry with us into our next pursuits,” she said. “They are: (1) learning to be comfortable with discomfort, (2) upholding the value of diversity, and (3) the practice of gratitude.”

Vital became highly involved in research beginning in her freshman year, as a Meyerhoff Scholar, MARC U*STAR, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Scholar. She has already co-authored two papers in top academic journals, and a third is coming soon. Her interest in completing clinically relevant research in an inclusive scientific community, like the one she found at UMBC, led her to select Emory University’s M.D./Ph.D. program in neurobiology as her next step.

Paula A. Johnson, president of Wellesley College, addressed graduates of the afternoon ceremony as an honorary degree recipient. Like Vital, Johnson spoke of the special nature of UMBC’s learning community. She reflected, “All of you have lived and learned within this remarkable culture, one that embodies the best of the nation’s values and ideals.”

Michelle Gourdine represented the University System of Maryland Board of Regents at the ceremonies, and shared her perspective on UMBC’s success. “By any measure—national rankings, research partnerships, public service activities, faculty accomplishments, student achievements…and let’s not forget athletic achievement—UMBC stands as one of the finest universities in the country,” she said.

President Hrabowski’s remarks this year focused on an appreciation for the value of truth and integrity, as well as service and commitment to community. He took time to honor veterans and graduating students who will pursue careers in social work and teaching. He also encouraged guests to read UMBC’s Class of 2018 feature, which highlights the personal stories of 43 Retrievers recognized for academic excellence and demonstrating a commitment to a greater good through research, scholarship, creativity, and work with underserved communities.

Before the graduates turned their tassels, he reminded them:

Your dreams, and more importantly, your character will determine who you become. Your character will be reflected most clearly in the courage you possess and the compassion you show for others.

Videos of President Hrabowski’s full remarks, as well as those of the honorary degree recipients; valedictorians; Graduate Student Association President Roy Prouty, M.S. ’16, atmospheric physics, M.S. ’19 computer science; and others are now available with captioning on UMBC’s YouTube and below.

Graduates and those cheering them on can share memories, well wishes, and photos through #UMBCgrad, and view UMBC’s Facebook page, Instagram, and Twitter accounts for coverage of the festivities.

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neKFFyTHeBU&t=6000s

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML9ipKp96pw&t=2387s

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoSqHtIdYic&t=6381s

Header image: CWIT Scholars celebrate together one last time. All photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.