Superfoods are nutrient powerhouses that pack large doses of antioxidants, polyphenols, vitamins, and minerals that are good for your heart and your overall health.  

Check out our featured superfood recipe each week!

“Truth matters. Science matters. And diversity in science matters,” says Erwin Cabrera ’10, biological sciences, president of the Meyerhoff Alumni Advisory Board. “It’s important for the public to know that scientists are a diverse set of people, and that the Meyerhoff Scholars are effecting change in policy and in STEM fields now.”

“It’s important to see people like us in these fields, but I think it’s even deeper than that,” adds Lydia Grmai ’11, biochemistry and molecular biology, vice president of the advisory board. “A diverse research space is a more collaborative, open, and inclusive space, and doing research in that environment is just going to be more productive.”

President Freeman Hrabowski and other campus leaders support the scholars’ efforts. Hrabowski and Jay Perman, president of University of Maryland, Baltimore, published a joint op-ed in The Baltimore Sun and on Center Maryland championing science and the core values of march.

“It is the scientific method that helps us distinguish between fact and fiction, and to make progress in fields from medicine to energy production, which impact our everyday lives,” the presidents write. They add that the administration’s proposed “draconian budget cuts” will severely undermine scientific research in the United States—and as a result, people’s health and safety.

The next generation of scientists, who can be found at UMBC, UMB, and other institutions around the world, “are the people who will one day solve the greatest challenges of clean energy and global sustainability, human health and well-being, national security, and economic opportunity,” Hrabowski and Perman write. “We take this responsibility to educate tomorrow’s problem-solvers seriously, and we support them in their fight to preserve smart and humane science policy and investment.”

Investment in science in the past has contributed to major progress. “Every modern medical advancement that has saved a patient’s life had its origins in the research lab,” write the presidents. “Every leap forward in making our computers faster and smaller, capable of calculations that send astronauts to space and help us better understand Earth, is achieved by researchers who appreciate the power of science.”

Cabrera and Grmai also emphasize that who does science is important, and they speak with pride of the Meyerhoff Scholars Program for its national impact in training a diverse community of STEM leaders.

“There are so many scientists of color out in the forefront making amazing discoveries,” says Grmai. Yet, “it’s not lost on us that our predecessors and our pioneers didn’t do it easily…People helped them to get where they are, and then they reached back and they’re helping us. We feel that duty and that obligation to reach back as well.”

Decades hence, “We’ll be in the history books,” for marching for science, Cabrera predicts. “We want to make sure that UMBC and Meyerhoff Scholars and people of color are marked down in history as movers and shakers.”

For additional coverage of UMBC community members’ participation in the march, read “Maryland researchers see March for Science as way to raise public trust, support for discovery” in The Baltimore Sun.

Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day (URCAD) features research, scholarship, and creative work carried out by UMBC undergraduates. Student work is shared through oral presentations, posters, artistic exhibits and performances, and film.

Over 250 presenters participate annually. Researchers work with faculty mentors on independent research, or research that is part of the mentor’s on-going projects.  They are from all disciplines, and can be working on a thesis, capstone project, part of a scholars or honors program, or they can be unaffiliated with other programs.

Students who have received Undergraduate Research Awards (URA) for the previous year will be presenting their findings. The UMBC Review, UMBC’s annual peer-reviewed research journal, which features academic papers written by UMBC undergraduates, makes its debut at this event- stop by and get your copy! Come hear the alumni keynote speaker talk about their experiences after UMBC, and how being an undergraduate researcher benefited them.

UMBC is unique in providing this opportunity for undergraduate students to conduct and present their research in a professional and supportive setting.  Students get valuable feedback from their peers, faculty, and staff, and practice their public speaking and presentations skills.  This campus-wide celebration of achievement affirms UMBC’s commitment to the twin goals of research and a distinctive undergraduate experience.

This is Lance.  He predicts that he will win the URCAD selfie contest.

"I've taken thousands of selfies," he noted. "They're having a red carpet and everything. Yeah, this one is in the bag."

Think you can beat Lance?

Upload your original photos to FaceBook and/or Twitter using #URCAD for a chance to win one of four gift cards to the UMBC Bookstore!

Categories:

• Best overall selfie: Take a photo with a UMBC celebrity (President Hrabowski, Provost Rous, Dean Stacey…) or get creative!
• Best with mentor
• Best with family member
• Best with student presentation/poster

The contest starts April 26, 2017 9:00 a.m. Upload photos by 4/28/17 at 6:00 p.m.

To be eligible to win the contest, you must follow the steps outlined below including uploading your original photo to FaceBook and/or Twitter using #URCAD.

Isaiah 55:1-3a (NIV) - “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and you will delight in the richest of fare. Give ear and come to me; listen, that you may live.”

“Of all the means by which Jesus could have chosen to be remembered, he chose to be remembered by a meal. What he considered memorable and characteristic of his ministry was the table-fellowship. The meal, one of humankind’s most basic and common practices, was transformed by Jesus into an occasion of divine encounter. It was in sharing of food and drink that he invited his companions to share in the grace of God. The quintessence of Jesus’ redemptive mission was revealed in his eating with sinners, repentant and unrepentant alike.” [C.T. McMahan]

Meals together can be a means to God’s grace, and the opportunity to share in the transforming power of God’s love. Like the meals with Jesus, each moment together are a call to follow Him and love each other like he loved us. They have direction and intention in every way - to love and welcome others into this ‘love feast’ of Jesus.

Let us hear afresh the invitation to come into fellowship with Jesus - thirsty, hungry, and in desperate for His presence. Let’s ask for a deeper and stronger fellowship with Him, and for hearts that listen and quickly come to him so that we may live (Isaiah 55:3), and live life to the full (John 10:10).

-TR

The UMBC Center for Hybrid Multicore Productivity Research (CHMPR)
is pleased to present as part of our distinguished lecture series

Human-Like Strategies for Language-Endowed Intelligent Agents

Dr. Sergei Nirenburg
Professor of Cognitive Science
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

11:00am Friday, 28 April 2017, ITE 325b

Artificial intelligent agents functioning in human-agent teams must correctly interpret perceptual input and make appropriate decisions about their actions. These are arguably the two central problems in computational cognitive modeling. The RPI LEIA Lab builds language-endowed intelligent agents that extract meaning of text and dialog and use the results together with input from other perception modes, a long-term belief repository, rich models of the world and of other agents, and a model of the interaction situation to make decisions about actions. Specific phenomena we currently concentrate on include incrementality, treatment of unexpected input and non-literal language (e.g., metaphor), analysis of agent biases and “mindreading,” and deliberate concept learning. All these studies are characterized by our belief in the ultimate utility of building causal models of agent capabilities that are inspired by human strategies in language processing and decision-making that go beyond analogical reasoning. In this talk I will give an overview of our recent work in the above areas.

Sergei Nirenburg is Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He also serves as Head of the Department of Cognitive Science. He has worked in the areas of cognitive science, artificial intelligence and natural language processing for over 35 years, leading R&D teams of up to 80. Dr. Nirenburg’s professional interests include developing computational models of human cognitive capabilities and implementing them in computer models of societies of human and computer agents, continuing development of the theory of ontological semantics, and the acquisition and management of knowledge about the world and about language. Academic R&D teams under Dr. Nirenburg’s leadership have implemented a variety of proof-of-concept and prototype application systems for cognitive modeling, intelligent tutoring and a variety of NLP tasks (machine translation, question answering, text summarization, information extraction, computational field linguistics, knowledge elicitation and learning). Dr. Nirenburg has written two and edited five books and published over 200 scholarly articles in journals and peer-reviewed conference proceedings.

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