Ephesians 4:2-6 (NIV) – “Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.”

“[Paul is] urging them to mount guard over that unity as one would set a troop of soldiers to guard a city or treasury. There are all sorts of things which can attack and spoil that unity, and these must be resisted, whatever they are and wherever they occur… Unless we are working to maintain, defend, and develop the unity we already enjoy, and to overcome, demolish and put behind us the disunity we still find ourselves in, we can scarcely claim to be following Paul’s teaching.” [Wright, Nicholas T. Paul for Everyone: The Prison Letters. 2004, London and Louisville, KY]

We can follow the teaching of Paul in God’s word because Jesus Himself was completely humble and gentle, and He came to us in the greatest of love. We can live this way because the Spirit Himself has given us unity with one another.

Let’s pray for our relationships and unity with other Christians, His church. As you pray, and then as you live, be open to the Spirit as He helps you to see how, where, and when He is asking you to make every effort, to defend, and to develop this unity of the Spirit that we already enjoy.

 Roses are red

Violets are blue

Take your next Tinder date

to an open mic with you

Tim sits at one of the high-top tables in Charmington’s coffee shop in the Charles Village/Remington neighborhood of Baltimore. Charmington’s offers an open mic on the last Tuesday of every month and anyone is welcome to perform.

From beneath his tattered baseball cap, Tim looks down at his spiral notebook and plays with the edges of its yellow sheets, contemplating which pages he wants to share for open mic night. When he finally does perform, he reads a few poems and then tells us a little story reflecting on his time in college and his recent loss of an old friend.

Tim is one of many performers who shared poetry at September’s open mic. Some others include Rebecca, the wonderful host who is currently working on a novel, and Taylor Ramage, who specializes in black out poetry and recently published an e-book of her work on Amazon.

Charmington’s is a wonderful platform to try your hand at performing because the coffee shop offers an all-inclusive environment for anyone of any gender, religion and even people who like Italian ice more than ice cream. Charmington’s even accepts guest hosts if you think you would be interested in hosting open mic night yourself.

At Charmington’s open mic, you can read anything from a chapter in your latest novella project, a comedy skit or a poem. You can literally read a poem by anyone and still feel the rush of standing before a bunch of strangers (PRO TIP: if you have been having problems with constipation, doing something nerve-wracking, like standing in front of an audience, is a sure way to inspire bowel movement).

If you’re not a poet at all, then you can at least go and eat some good food or get a coffee. They have almond and soy milk, and a really good vegan sandwich but also some turkey stuff if you are into meat. OH. And there are these little s’mores treats there.

Anyway, everyone loves poetry, and if you think you do not love poetry, you are sadly mistaken because every text message you have ever sent to your mom could be combined into a poem and if you say you do not love your mom then you are a liar!

So if you want to take your Tinder date to the next level, invite your date out to open mic night and read one of Beyonce’s songs as a poem (I recommend “Flawless,” but you do you). Even if the date ends really poorly, at least you can update your bio to reflect how artsy and emotionally vulnerable you are now that you have listened to other people read poetry. Plus, the open mic starts at 7 and only goes for about an hour, so if the Tinder date is really bad (trust me, they can be), then you can totally bail at 8.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded funding to a group of UMBC faculty in two colleges to study how applying heat to drug-carrying nanoparticles can cause tumors to shrink. The researchers will use the three-year grant totalling more than $330,000 to develop a more targeted, non-surgical approach to treating tumors in cancer patients.

“Our proposed experiments and simulations will help determine whether elevating temperature in the body is a viable approach to increase the amount of drug-carrying nanoparticles in tumors,” explains Liang Zhu, professor of mechanical engineering and PI of the grant. “This strategy, if successful, will not only ensure delivering high payloads of anticancer drugs directly to tumors where they are needed the most, but also result in an overall reduction of drug dosage, and thereby reduce systemic toxicity in other body organs.”

The work combines mechanical engineering, biology, and chemistry to use 3D X-ray imaging to understand the amount of nanoparticles transferred from the bloodstream into tumors, and the distribution of these nanoparticles in the tumors. Zhu, Ronghui Ma, associate professor of mechanical engineering, Chuck Bieberich, professor of biological sciences, and Marie Christine Daniel-Onuta, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry, will collaborate on the grant.

After injecting nanoparticles into the bloodstream, Zhu and her collaborators will look at the distribution and concentration of the nanoparticles eventually deposited in the tumor. This will allow them to evaluate whether applying heat to tumors lowers the pressure in the tumor, and determine how the application of heat impacts the blood supply to the tumors. Utilizing heat to enhance drug delivery to targeted tumors could lead to reduced toxicity in other body organs, Zhu explains.

Treatment options that are currently available to target tumors include surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. Although potent therapeutic drugs have already been developed, delivering them to tumors and achieving sufficient drug concentrations throughout the entire tumor remain significant hurdles to overcome, explains Zhu. “Not every patient can have surgery so this is an alternative treatment option,” she says.

One important aspect of the research is to develop a drug delivery method that can be repeated and customized for individual patients. The faculty will use 3D imaging to visualize the distribution of nanoparticles in the tumor, and mathematical simulations to predict how increased temperature might work in tumors of different sizes and shapes.

This NSF grant will continue work on controlling how heated nanoparticles are delivered to cancer tumors. The work began in 2008 and was extended in 2013. 

Banner image: Ronghui Ma, Liang Zhu, and Marie Christine Daniel-Onuta working in the lab. All photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 for UMBC.

Bedecked in black and gold, the Retriever community came out in full force for the 2017 Homecoming celebration. Held over the first two weekends in October, this year’s festivities combined old favorites with new traditions, and brought faculty, staff, alumni, students, and members of the wider UMBC community together to celebrate another year of grit and greatness.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 5: Alumni Awards

Homecoming kicked off on Thursday, October 5, with our Alumni Awards ceremony, an annual event honoring graduates and faculty who have made outstanding contributions to their fields and their communities.

This year’s Alumni Award winners were Sylvia Trent-Adams, Ph.D.’06, public policy; Kafui Dzirasa ’01, M8, chemical engineering; Kate Laskowski ’06, biological sciences and chemistry; Steven Storck ’08, mechanical engineering and mathematics, M.S. ’09, mechanical engineering, and Ph.D. ’14, mechanical engineering; Dennis Williams II ’14, American studies; Lauren Mazzoli ’15, mathematics and computer science, and M.S.’17, computer science; and Alejandro Cremaschi ’93, music. Our Outstanding Faculty Award went to Marc Zupan, associate professor and graduate program director in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

For a full recap of this year’s event, click here; you can also check out a live video of the ceremony on our Facebook page.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 6: Bonfire and Big Prize Poetry Slam

Homecoming festivities continued into Friday, as we brought alumni, students, faculty, and staff around the traditional Erickson Field bonfire. The blaze has been a Homecoming mainstay since 2005; this year’s celebration boasted food, fun, and plenty of Retriever spirit to go around.

Elsewhere on campus, the English Department’s annual Big Prize Poetry Slam was in full swing as alumni and students competed for the top spot in the spoken-word competition. “It’s a perfect storm of students, alumni, faculty, fans, all supporting each other, caring about poetry, recognizing that this art form matters and that these poets sharing their work really matter[s],” Sally Shivnan, associate director of the writing and rhetoric division of the Department of English, told The Retriever Weekly.

Amber C. Wheeler ’21, English, took home the night’s $200 top prize; Calista Ogburn ’21, health administration and policy, and Charles Griffin ’18, philosophy, came in second and third, respectively.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 7: Retriever Dance Marathon and Block Show

Students spent the first Homecoming Saturday getting their groove on across campus, as the annual Retriever Dance Marathon kicked off in the UC Ballroom, and members of the National Panhellenic Council, Multicultural Greek Council, Caribbean Student Council, Black Student Union, and Major Definition performed in the UMBC Block Show.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 9: Homecoming Hype

The dance team, the pep band, the free (seb) swag…all was present and accounted for on the Commons Mainstreet at free hour to kick off the first official week of Homecoming.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 11: Campus Campaign Kickoff

On Wednesday afternoon, folks from all across the campus community gathered on Erickson Field to help kick off UMBC’s Grit and Greatness Campaign (which you can read more about here). We asked students, faculty, and staff to share with us their proudest accomplishments, what the word “partnership” means to them, and how UMBC has changed their lives…and we were bowled over by the answers we got. In exchange, participants received a limited-edition Grit and Greatness Campaign t-shirt…which proved to be so popular that we ran out early!

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 13: Student Leader Reunion and Comedy Show with Trevor Noah

Friday the 13th was a lucky one for UMBC, as The Daily Show host Trevor Noah played live to a sold-out crowd in the RAC! Right before the show, alumni members of (seb), Greek Life, SGA, and former Commons student staff gathered in the RAC fitness center to share memories and a meal.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 14: Grit-X, Alumni Reunions, Carnival, and Soccer Game

Homecoming Saturday started with the second annual Grit-X Talks, where we brought faculty and alumni in fields from neuroscience to engineering to teaching to dance back to campus to share their expertise in bite-sized presentations. Check out the full recap of that event here.

Elsewhere, students enjoyed breakfast with their families in the Skylight Room; folks from all over the surrounding community came to the Homecoming Carnival, featuring rides, face painting, and a petting zoo; and alumni from every Retriever decade reconnected at reunions in the Alumni Tent and across campus.

The night ended with a 3-1 win for the Retriever men’s soccer team against defending conference champs Albany, a fitting coda to more than a week of Grit and Greatness.

— Julia Celtnieks ’13; all photos by Marlayna Demond ’11 unless otherwise noted

DELL Technologies In-Person Seminar
VMWare Social Lab

10.24.2017 9AM-4PM
UMBC Technology Center
1450 South Rolling Road
Baltimore, Maryland  21227
MEEC @ UMBC Technology Center South