In addition to her outstanding management skills, Danita Eichenlaub has demonstrated leadership in the development of financial systems and controls which are now being modeled across the campus.

Eichenlaub supervises all aspects of the administrative and financial management for two research centers, GEST and JCET. She has merged the two administrative staffs from the centers into one team and monitors sponsored research funding of $20-25 million annually.

As one of the original PeopleSoft peer mentors, Eichenlaub is frequently consulted for her expertise in business processes and the management of a large administrative unit. She serves on the HR-Finance Advisory Board and the HR Upgrade Committee.

Eichenlaub takes time to train business staff across the campus in business specialist skills, helping them to be more efficient in their jobs. She is acknowledged as a mentor by the Centers' nearly 200 research faculty. Her diligence, perseverance, knowledge and ownership of the Centers makes an important difference to both her colleagues and UMBC. Despite her large workload, she brings a teaching attitude and patience to every situation.

She received her B.A. in Physics and M.A.S.in Administrative Science from The Johns Hopkins University.

Mathew is the author of one of the leading books in the field, Statistical Tests for Mixed Linear Models, and is currently working on a highly anticipated book on Statistical Tolerance Regions, representing a recent area of research. He has been a co-editor or associate editor of four prestigious international statistics journals, and he has produced 85 original research articles, many of them in leading statistics journals.

Exceptionally prolific in obtaining independent funding for his research, Mathew has received grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the Army Research Office.

Mathew has provided a high level of service to UMBC and the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. He was instrumental in the creation of the B.S. program in Statistics, including writing the program proposal and helping to create new graduate and undergraduate courses. After graduation, his students often receive prominent positions at universities and in industry. His versatility as a researcher is evident in the doctoral dissertations he has supervised on a wide variety of topics.

Mathew earned a B.S. in Mathematics and a M.S. in Statistics from the University of Kerala, India. He received his Ph.D. in Statistics from the Indian Statistical Institute.

Each year, the UMBC Alumni Association presents awards to honor alumni for their professional and personal achievements and service to the University. Throughout the coming weeks, we’ll be introducing you to each award winner individually, but for now, we would like to congratulate them all on their wonderful achievements. 

The UMBC Alumni Association proudly honors these distinguished alumni and faculty for their accomplishments and dedication to the University:

Engineering and Information Technology
Dr. Claudia Pearce ’89 M.S., ’94 Ph.D., Computer Science
Senior Computer Science Authority, NSA

Who are we and where have we been are questions fundamental to the human existence that are studied by UMBC students as part of a well-rounded liberal arts education. Scott Casper, Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences and Professor of History, recently provided a commentary on WYPR’s Humanities Connection in which he advocated for studying the humanities as a way to prepare students for a thoughtful and civically engaged life.

“In a world of polarized politics and cost-benefit analysis, our realm of possibilities is often cast as ‘either-or’: Republican or Democratic, guns or butter, right or wrong. A liberal arts education encourages us to imagine another approach: not ‘either-or,’ but ‘both-and,’ a world of complexities rather than easy answers, interconnections rather than boundaries,” said Casper.

As part of his commentary, Casper outlined five distinct areas in which UMBC students encounter “both-and”: the global and the local, the changing and the timeless, the intellectual and the spiritual, the arts and the sciences, and thought and action.

“By asking questions that are fundamental to human existence and by encouraging ‘both-and,’ rather than simplistic ‘either-or,’ answers, the liberal arts prepare students at UMBC and elsewhere for a lifetime of reflection and purpose,” Casper said, adding, “the interplay of reflection and purpose is the bedrock of thoughtful citizenship, and the hallmark of a life well-lived.”

To listen to the full segment that aired on Humanities Connection, click here.

History Professor Kate Brown will speak at this year’s Baltimore Book Festival, which runs from September 26-28. The festival features hundreds of appearances from local, celebrity and nationally-known authors. More than 100 exhibitors and booksellers will be on hand at the festival with readings, workshops and panel discussions also on the agenda.

Brown is scheduled to present a talk on Friday, September 26 at 7 p.m. as part of the Ivy Bookshop author tent. She will be discussing her award-winning book, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2013), in which she tells the stories of Hanford, Washington and Ozersk, Russia. The Soviet and American governments created these communities to produce the plutonium that fueled the nuclear arms race during the Cold War.

Earlier this year, Brown was awarded the 2014 Ellis W. Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians (OAH) for the best book-length historical study of the political economy, politics, or institutions of the United States, in its domestic or international affairs, from the Civil War to the present. She also received the American Society for Environmental History’s George Perkins Marsh Prize for the best book in environmental history.

For more information on the Baltimore Book Festival, click here.

In his latest column in The Baltimore Sun, Political Science Professor and Chair Thomas Schaller wrote about two major developments that have the potential to revolutionize collegiate athletics: an NCAA ruling that gave five major conferences greater autonomy and a federal judge ruling that stated the NCAA violated the Sherman Anti-Trust Act by profiting from the images of student-athletes without compensating them.

When referring to the ruling in the federal case O’Bannon v. NCAA, Schaller wrote, “legal experts further believe that because the O’Bannon ruling vacates the NCAA’s long-cherished amateurism exception, a series of follow-up rulings may follow, including the resolution of a key case (Jenkins v. NCAA) that threatens to upend the NCAA’s current economic model.”

To read Schaller’s complete column published August 19 in The Baltimore Sun titled, “Getting their due,” click here.