BUCKETLOADTRADITIONSBYTHE THE “M BOOK” IS BACK WITH A NEW BUCKET LIST. JOIN A TERP TACKLING ITS 20 DON’T-MISS MILESTONES. PG. 36 FALL 2022 / CONNECTING THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND COMMUNITY FEARLESSLY FORWARD
Thousands of fans pack Bob “Turtle” Smith Stadium at dusk on June 5 to cheer on the 15th-seeded University of Maryland baseball team against UConn in the NCAA regional tournament, the first hosted in College Park. The Big Ten-champion Terps also welcomed Long Island University and Wake Forest during the excitement-filled weekend, battling their way to the sold-out final vs. the Huskies. Despite falling, 11-8, UMD finished the season with its best record in history (48-14), along with program highs in home runs (137) and runs scored (572). “Our guys absolutely emptied the tank,” Head Coach Rob Vaughn said. “They gave every ounce of who they are. We can leave here with our heads held high knowing we did some really special things this year.”
PHOTO BY ZACH BLAND/ MARYLAND ATHLETICS
OUT WITH THE CROWD
2 TERP.UMD.EDU ONCONTENTSTHEMALL POST-GRAD 42 Alumni Association 44 Critic Thinking 46 A Period of Change 47 Blue Ambition 47 Class Notes 48 From the Archives NEWS 6 “A Link to the Past and a Window to the Future” 7 UMD, GMU Launch Gun Violence Prevention Effort 8 Home on the Range CAMPUS LIFE 10 “Bridging” an Academic Divide 11 Tell and Show 12 A New Recipe for Success 13 Da Vinci Drone’s New Twist 14 Talk About an Impressive Season 15 Fast Break With New Head Hoops Coach EXPLORATIONS 16 A “Word” About Research 16 Signs of the Times 18 How to Make Friends as an Adult—and Keep Them 19 Rewriting the “Script” for LGBTQ+ Caregivers 19 Right in the Nose 20 Big Data “Early Alarm” for Ukraine Abuses 21 At Journey’s End, a Warmer Welcome 22 Flipping the Channel 23 The Big Question Congratulations to Terp’s creative director, John T. Consoli, who won the 2022 Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) Circle of Excellence Grand Gold—the international competition’s top award—in photography portraiture. His image of Professor Joseph Richardson appeared with the Winter 2021 feature “Trigger Guard.”
The University of Maryland Extension takes urban gardeners in Baltimore to Farmer Field School.
BY CHRIS CARROLL
An alum at the helm of Ukrainian newspapers redoubles efforts to connect and inform during the Russian invasion.
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The popular grocer prepares for a downtown opening as part of the Greater College Park revitalization.
From A to Zucchini
The “M Book,” with its 20 don’t-miss Maryland milestones, is back. Join a super-spirited student on her journey to complete them all.
30 The Modern Battle for Maryland’s Oysters Pirates plundered and diseases decimated the Chesapeake’s bounty. Now UMD researchers are wielding AI and robotics to save the struggling industry.
Words on War
Trader Joe’s in the Bag
FEATURES ONLINE
BY ANNIE KRAKOWER
Get the latest on the UMD community by visiting TODAY.UMD.EDU.
24 Coal Veins
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36 A Bucketload of Terp Traditions
Waves of immigrants have long clashed in Pennsylvania coal country, where a UMD anthropologist is digging into the commonalities between old and new.
BY LIAM FARRELL
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CHRIS CARROLL LIAM KARENSALAANNIEFARRELLKRAKOWERLEVIN’10SHIH’09
LAUREN BROWN University Editor
EMAIL terpfeedback@umd.edu ONLINE terp.umd.edu NEWS umdrightnow.umd.edu FACEBOOK.COM / UnivofMaryland TWITTER.COM /UofMaryland INSTAGRAM.COM / univofmaryland YOUTUBE.COM /UMD2101
4 TERP.UMD.EDU
COVER Photo by John T. Consoli
BRIAN ULLMANN ’92 Vice President, Marketing and Communications
JOHN T. CONSOLI ’86 Creative Director
Designers
Lauren Brown University Editor
VALERIE MORGAN Art Director
And take another look at how the past and future collide in Chris Carroll’s dive into the Chesapeake Bay’s “oyster wars” (page 30). Their victim was the industry itself, now on the verge of collapse, but University of Maryland robotics researchers have an ingenious idea on how to use underwater drones to see—and save—the mollusks.Ihope to see you back on campus later this semester for Homecoming. Wishing you all a happy fall.
I paused at its wall of windows overlooking the football and lacrosse practice fields along with the baseball diamond on the “Bob.” Eating that sandwich while watching a live game would be a world away from a dinnertime bowl of cereal in a dark corner back when I was a college student.
KOLIN CHARLENELAURENBEHRENSBIAGINIPROSSERCASTILLO
HONG H. HUYNH Photography Assistant
the new dining hall here might feature an even better view than the BBQ Spiced Sliced Turkey Jalapeno Cheddar Sauce Sub Sandwich (whew!) in front of me.
MARGARET HALL Executive Director, Creative Strategies
Writers
STEPHANIE S. CORDLE Photographer
JAGU CORNISH Production Manager
GAIL RUPERT M.L.S. ’10 Photography Archivist
Writer Liam Farrell takes an engrossing personal approach to his feature (page 24) on a UMD anthropologist’s work in a rapidly transforming former Pennsylvania coal-mining region: It’s where Farrell’s own great-grandfather was killed in a mine accident. Read how that misfortune steered his Irish-immigrant family’s trajectory and parallels the experiences that Professor Paul Shackel now explores as Hispanic families become the new arrivals.
FROM THE EDITOR
You’ll smile at another modern take on the student experience, with her cover story (page 36) on the reawakened M Book and its “bucket list” of traditions to participate in before graduating. It’s a fun way to encourage today’s undergraduates to get involved and learn about the university’s past and present, and we met a gungho Terp determined to cross off all 20 items on the list.
The University of Maryland, College Park is an equal opportunity institu tion with respect to both education and employment. University policies, programs and activities are in conformance with pertinent federal and state laws and regulations on non-discrimination regarding race, color, religion, age, national origin, political affiliation, gender, sexual orientation or disability.
On a “taste drive” at Yahentamitsi with other campus employees before the semester started, we had a jolly time touring the 11 food stations and promising ourselves that we wouldn’t overeat while deliberating among dozens of entrees and side dishes.
The hilarious differences in dining at Maryland now vs. 50 years ago (when the last dining hall was built) is the focus of Annie Krakower’s story on Yahentamitsi (page 12). You’ll also find out more about how this building, the heart of the new Heritage residential community, honors the Indigenous Piscataway people of the state.
Adviser
Magazine Staff
Publisher
I was a participant of those “interest groups” (before women’s sports were recog nized), having graduated in 1960 as a phys ed teacher, and was glad to see that a UMD alum was responsible. The article brought back memories, some good, some not so good—such as having to scramble for trans portation to the universities we were scheduled to play. We survived but definitely resented not being identified as varsity teams.
I read about the smell that “occasionally invades” Cheverly, Md. The article said that the smell is “similar to burning coffee—even though it’s definitely not from a Starbucks.”
Several sharp-eyed readers contacted us about this. Thank you! We passed on this information to our partners on this article at the city of College Park, who kindly shared these photos.
—MARYLAND PROMISE PROGRAM RECIPIENTSSCHOLARSHIP
I’m rather surprised no one thought it might actually be coffee: The Eight O’Clock coffee roasting facility is one of the industrial operations the article talks about. I can smell it when the wind is right. It has been my experience that the aroma from a commercial roastery (that one and others) can smell like the coffee is burnt.
My stepfather, a pretty good cook for a dentist, broiled a turkey. The stuffing included chorizos, giblets and de-seeded prunes. The side dishes consisted of red kidney beans and rice, fried sweet plantains and yuca. Everything well condi mented with garlic.
Growing Justice From Grassroots Science
I want to be bold and sure of the decisions I make, and I think MPP will allow me to do that.
The Clark Challenge for the Maryland Promise will establish a $100 million endowment to provide need-based scholarships to talented undergraduates in Maryland and the District of Columbia.
How We Picture Greatness
—MARK OPEKA ’80, M.S. ’83, PH.D. ’95, BIRMINGHAM, ALA.
I spoke not one word of English but somehow made friends with kids in my new school. I invited a couple of them to a feast to which I was going to be introduced: Thanksgiving.
—PEDRO E. WASMER ’62, NAPLES, FLA.
IN TERP LAY
WRITE TO US We love to hear from readers. Send your feedback, insights, compliments— and, yes, complaints—to terpfeedback@umd.edu or to: Terp OfficemagazineofMarketing and 7736CommunicationsBaltimoreAve.,CollegePark,MD20742
Gifts of any size to the Maryland Promise Program will be matched dollar for dollar. You can support deserving scholars now at promise.umd.edu
The Godmother of Title IX
—ANN WASS PH.D. ’92, RIVERDALE, MD.
No Appetite for Racist Stereotypes
I enjoyed the historic photos and can recall these landmarks from when I started at UMD and from growing up in Beltsville. I did note some inaccuracies, however:Thetop photo on page 24 is labeled 1949-50. However, the car on the left side is a 1956 Chevy Belair four-door sedan. The top photo on page 27 is labeled 1949. However, the nearest car moving away from the viewer is a 1955 Chevy, and the white car in front of it appears to be an early 1960s auto. Irecall large glass panes in the front of the Book Exchange No. 2 (page 25). They were broken out during the Vietnam War protests and never replaced.
I was very pleased to learn of Professor Psyche A. WilliamsForson’s book “Eating While Black,” which reminded me of my experiences after moving from Santiago, Cuba to Baltimore in 1951 when my widowed mother remarried.
A recent USA Today Network article in our Sunday paper focused on the stillexisting disparity between men’s and women’s sports on campuses nationwide. Title IX helped a lot but unfortunately, we still have a long way to go!
After some sniffing and quizzical looks, my new friends dug in and seemed to enjoy the unusual meal. We should embrace all of the different cultural elements that make up the American Quilt, whether it is food, literature or plain perspective. This is not “practiced tolerance,” but acceptance that we each bring something new to the table.
Correction: An article on the TerrapinSTRONG onboarding program in the Spring issue incorrectly identified Elaine Johnson Coates ’59 as the first African American woman to graduate from UMD. She was the first to earn an undergraduate degree; Rose Shockley Wiseman and Myrtle Holmes Wake earned M.Ed. degrees in 1951.
I have known I wanted to go here my whole life. Amazing financial aid is why I am here getting the education I need.
I see myself in 10 to 15 years as Aneurosurgeon.adegreefromUMD is worth so much to me.
—MARTHA BORON ’60, CANTON, MICH.
This space for the entire university’s use has movable seating for 140 to allow students and instructors to collaborate in small groups. A glass-fronted conference room one level up in the back can serve as VIP or overflow room.
“A Link to the Past and a Window to the Future”
Still, the great philosopher and politician would both laud (with exceptional oratory) how the striking, light-filled structure that opened this semester supports the school’s mission to advance the public good, drawing together students, faculty and other experts in interconnected areas that will foster world-changing discourse and discussion.
“It’s not just a high-quality space for training public leaders, but also designed to put students and faculty into practi tioners’ space,” says Dean Robert C. Orr.
The building’s placement is also thoughtful, at the nexus of “town and gown”: Built into the gentle slope north of Chapel Field, the facility faces that green space, along with the bustling Baltimore Avenue corridor and the Rossborough Inn and overlooking McKeldin Mall. The light-rail Purple Line will pass right by the building, cementing its role as a welcoming entrance to campus.
The 70,000-square-foot building, made possible through the support of private donors in partnership with the state and university, also unites the School of Public Policy community under one roof for the first time in its 40-year history; its offices, centers and classrooms had been spread out over five sites across campus. Orr says the new hub, with its multifunctional and high-tech spaces, “will dramatically enhance the student experience.”
School of Public Policy’s Dynamic New Building Invites ProblemSolving Discourse
THE SCHOOL OF PUBLIC POLICY’S new home is inspired by ancient Greece, but Plato and Pericles would surely be befuddled by its immersive videoconferencing, mic’d-up seating and transparent walls.
ON THE MALL NEWS 6 TERP.UMD.EDU PHOTOS BY JOHN T. CONSOLI
Savakova imagined the wide, gently descending ramp extending across the building as “a concourse of conver sations.” This indoor plaza/ lounge space is furnished with small tables and comfortable chairs where students can meet and work while looking out giant windows onto Chapel Lawn and down Baltimore Avenue. Shades activated by light sensors help maintain the building’s temperature to minimize HVAC use.
Agora Study Spaces
Lecture Hall
He and architect Irena Savakova M.Arch. ’95 of the firm Leo A Daly share more on how the building is, as she puts it, “a link to the past and a window to the future.”—LB
The Agora, for example, is named for the central gathering spot and marketplace of ideas in Athens often considered the birthplace of democracy, while the building’s deliberative classroom is a contemporary take on a classic parliamentary debate chamber.
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Reading Room and Terrace
This flexible top-floor space connecting indoors and outdoors offers sweeping views and will host experts, speakers, and public and private leaders.
The outside area fronting the Rossborough Inn will celebrate UMD’s role as the nation’s first Do Good Campus. Public art will include a set of giant illuminated rings that will activate as people pass through with audio on how Terps are doing good in the community and around the world. These rings will lead people into the atrium, where they can interact with displays that tell the university’s greatest “do good” stories.
Collaboration With D.C.- Area Universities to Pursue EvidenceBased Solutions
UMD, GMU Launch Gun PreventionViolenceEffort
IN THE WAKE of horrifying mass shootings in Buffalo, N.Y., Highland Park, Ill., and Uvalde, Texas, the University of Maryland and George Mason University are joining with other institutions around the Washington, D.C., region to advance solutions to American gun violence.
This oval-shaped forum is suitable for courses, public events and debates. It’s equipped with a state-of-the-art conferencing system, including microphones at all 50 seats
Do Good Plaza
Deliberative Classroom
and cameras that automatically track anyone speaking, allowing classes to easily engage with students and experts around the world. “It literally gives students a voice” in discussions, Orr says.
The idea of UMD President Darryll J. Pines and GMU President Gregory Washington, the initiative also includes Georgetown University and Howard University, and Johns Hopkins University and Virginia Tech as affiliate members.
“Guns are now the leading cause of death for young people, and we are charged with shaping young minds to tackle the grand challenges of our time,” Pines says. “We lead communities that are deeply affected by the mass slaughter of citizens, and some weeks it feels like the flags at our public institutions fly ceaselessly at half-staff.”—LF
Called “The 120 Initiative” for the more than 120 people who are killed by firearms on average every day, the group will be coordinated by the Consortium of Universities of the Washington Metropolitan Area. Experts in areas such as public and mental health, business, education and technology will develop evidence-based recommendations to drive down gun violence.
“I grew up around here … everyone from this area has a connection of some kind to Mr. Houghton and this property,” he says. “It’s a special place.”
I
in how to use the land for cattle, UMD has other oppor tunities, says Kathryne Everts, WREC director and professor in the Department of Plant Science and Landscape Architecture. Aspen’s former offices provide space for learning, and AGNR will offer a farm equipment maintenance and safety class at the farm in Spring 2023.
The gift and purchase approximately doubled the area of UMD’s Wye Research and Education Center (WREC), where College of Agriculture and Natural Resources (AGNR) faculty and University of Maryland Extension agents study farming—on land and in the Chesapeake Bay—wildlife management and environmental protection.
world’s most stable, genetically well-un derstood populations.AngusStartingthis year, thanks to a huge land acquisition at the farm located on a peninsula jutting into the Wye River south of Queenstown, the program itself is also more stable than ever.
Draper (above, right), who manages UMD’s Wye Angus program, points out attributes that helped the animal sell in the university herd’s annual spring auction: friendly disposition, sturdy frame, healthylooking udder. “This cow’s a good mother,” he declares.Whenshe ships out in a few days, she’ll leave behind a “family” of about 200 cows established more than 80 years ago—one that’s valuable both to agriculture researchers and to commercial beef operations looking to inject desirable traits. Through careful management and breeding, Draper and his predecessors have created one of the
t’s a hazy afternoon in late May when Eddie Draper pulls over an old Chevy pickup along a farm lane on what was once the Eastern Shore plantation of a Declaration of Independence signer. Under a nearby tree, a black cow stops munching grass and peers into the cab with big, placid eyes.
Since the herd was donated to UMD in 1979 by industrial tycoon and philan thropist Arthur Houghton—who closed it to outside bloodlines in 1959 while developing a showcase cattle operation—it’s lived on leased land that Houghton gifted to the Aspen Institute, a famed public policy body that used Houghton’s grand residences (above) as a conference center. This spring, however, Aspen gave 330 acres worth $2.8 million to UMD, which bought another 233 acres for $937,000. It’s part of the property on which Founding Father William Paca once operated a major farm that, with the labor of enslaved people, produced tobacco and other crops.
Donation, Land Purchase Permanently Place Angus Cattle Program on UMD Land
Home on the Range
8 TERP.UMD.EDU PHOTOS BY JOHN T. CONSOLI
—cc NEWSON THE MALL
our research excellence in genetics and sustainable food production,” says UMD President Darryll J. Pines. “We have a respon sibility to address grand challenges and serve the public good for all of humanity, and we look forward to using this as an opportunity to find new ways to improve food security for the world’s growingBesidespopulation.”greaterleeway
The Aspen Institute’s “generous gift, along with the purchase of additional acres, allows us to continue and expand
“I want to strengthen our connections to and service to undergraduate academic programs,” Everts says. “These new resources can help us better connect to campus.”Asthe afternoon heats up, Draper continues motoring around the farm. In one spot, lounging calves jump up for a closer look at the visitors; in another, steers—some bound for UMD dining hall menus—cluster in the shady edge of a field. Nearby, other Wye River denizens—a pair of bald eagles— peer down from a nest built in riverside land that UMD manages for the state to protect bayDraper,ecosystems.whoretired this summer after 36 years overseeing the herd and the broader program, calls himself “the luckiest person at the University of Maryland.” The donation gives him assurance that the program started by Houghton and continued by UMD is secure for years to come.
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W
riting while imprisoned has a pedigreed history: Henry David Thoreau did it, along with Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Now, thanks to the efforts of UMD faculty and students, those incarcerated by Washington, D.C.’s Department of Corrections are learning how to pen their own thoughts and stories from behind bars.
The effects have been palpable for many students, who describe the program as “challenging” and “a pleasure,” and say it’s given them confidence and perspective.
“We teach writing as a civic act. We argue that writing is a method of empowerment.”
—ELIZABETH CATCHMARK, DOCTORAL STUDENT
ON THE MALL CAMPUS LIFE 10 TERP.UMD.EDU
ILLUSTRATION BY VALERIE MORGAN
Foster says that her experience volun teering in jails led her to her current work at a community center in Queens, N.Y., that offers services and programming to people who have had interactions with the justice system. “Getting involved exposed me to the social justice realm and made me realize this is something I can do for a career,” she says.—sl
“This course help[s] me to learn more things about myself,” wrote one student in feedback.
“I feel a [sense] of gratitude just being a part
Faculty and Students Bring Writing Course to D.C. Corrections Facilities
Forcourses.Foster, nurturing one-on-one pedagogical relationships with her students has been at least as important as improving their writing skills. “One of the biggest things I’ve learned is the importance of building trust and looking at the whole person,” she says.
of the program,” wrote another.
Associate Professor of English and Honors College Executive Director Peter Mallios and doctoral student Elizabeth Catchmark are working alongside UMD undergraduates to help students in jail learn the techniques and nuances of different forms of writing.
The course is centered around under standing written arguments, crafting them and developing a philosophy of writing. Students read King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and Audre Lorde’s “Poetry
“We teach writing as a civic act,” says Catchmark. “We argue that writing is a method of Throughempowerment.”thePGP’svirtual program, participants have access to a tablet at certain hours, during which they can watch the lectures from Mallios and Catchmark, get one-on-one support from undergraduate tutors and work on assignments. The goal is to prepare students for higher education and job opportunities while helping them unlock their own abilities.
“Bridging” an Academic Divide
is Not a Luxury” as examples of effective writing and ultimately compose an essay exploring “what kind of writer they want to be, what their values are as a writer and how their experiences have shaped those values,” saysNextCatchmark.spring,she and Mallios plan to introduce a companion 15-week course to UMD students, starting with six weeks of learning about mass incarceration, prison education and tutoring techniques, followed by participation in the PGP’s tutoringMalliosprogram.wasdrawn to the Petey Greene Program after having taught incarcerated students at Goucher College. Kayla Foster ’21 was president of UMD’s chapter of the PGP, inspired to join after reading “Just Mercy,” attorney Bryan Stevenson’s memoir of his work with disadvantaged clients. She estimates that she’s worked with some 10 to 15 students, helping them with GED preparation and math
The work is part of a college bridge program developed and operated by the nonprofit Petey Greene Program to support current and formerly incarcerated learners who have a high school credential but seek to improve their writing or math skills in prepa ration for college.
“Telling Our Story: Community Conversations with Our Artists,” this fall’s exhibit at the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora, tears down the velvet rope between visitor and gallery by inviting art lovers to choose the pieces on display.
Tell and Show
“It’s been a really organic and celebratory experi ence,” says Holton. “The key is accessibility.”
Guests Curate Driskell Center Exhibit by Sharing Artworks That Moved Them
THE QUINTESSENTIAL ART MUSEUM with its pristine white walls and its visitors speaking in hushed, reveren tial voices–can seem like a cathedral to the inaccessible, a collection of works chosen by an invisible curator who’s deemed them worthy of awe.
For Cronrath, the experience was unique. “I just felt I was very privileged to go to a collection like the Driskell Center and ask to see things rather than waiting for them to put something on exhibit,” he says.
Curlee Holton, executive director of the Driskell Center, asked some 30 art aficionados—but not experts—to enter the center’s vault, browse the works in the permanent collection, and choose two or three that spoke to them. The guests were asked to write a letter to the artists explaining why they chose their piece and what it meant to them. Both the letters and the chosen artworks are on display through December.
Kayleigh Byrant-Greenwell ’09, a museum engagement strategist and coordinator of the exhibit, led the selectors through a vault she likened to a “glorious, high-ceilinged walk-in closet.” The visitors
11FALL 2022REST STOP , 1979, BY PHOEBE BEASLEY; COURTESY OF THE DAVID C. DRISKELL CENTER
hand-cranked their way through compact stacks, combed through flat shelving and peered at a room full of sculptures.DavidCronrath, professor of archi tecture, chose two pieces: “untitled” by Manuel Hughes, which Cronrath was delighted to discover was not the bas relief it looked like from pictures but a two-dimensional painting, and “Rest Stop” by Phoebe Beasley, which shows people sitting on a bench, waiting for a bus. “I came to appreciate the humanity of the people depicted,” he says.
SEE YA, STYROFOAM
FROM FROZEN TO FRESH
It’s UMD’s first new dining hall since the South Campus Dining Hall debuted in 1974. So what’s been cooking in the almost half-century in between? We dug into the biggest differences in menus and Terp eating habits over the decades.—AK
Picky eaters might’ve struggled in the South Campus Dining Hall’s early days, when dinner meant a choice of just two entrees, two vegetables, a starch and a pre-plated dessert, says Senior Associate Director Joe Mullineaux, who’s worked in Dining Services for over 40 years. Common main dishes included meatloaf, liver, and spaghetti and meatballs, and salad bar options were limited to iceberg lettuce and carrot and celery sticks. Yahentamitsi instead offers “a little something for everybody” with 11 major food stations, like Mediterranean, Asian, comfort food, breakfast all day, glutenfree and a bakery.
A New Recipe for Success
The South Campus Dining Hall was constructed with the goal of serving “convenience” foods, Mullineaux says, so meals would arrive frozen in big metal pans, “sort of like a huge TV dinner,” then get reheated. Now fresh cooking is the norm, and Yahentamitsi takes that to a new level. On top of made-to-order options throughout the dining hall, the “Chef’s Corner” allows Dining Services’ 16 trained chefs to experiment with flavors and cooking styles and explain their creations to curious Terps.
a student has time in their schedule—when it’s the most logical and sensible—they can come eat.”
While the kitchen is hidden in the South Campus Dining Hall, counters with glass dividers at Yahentamitsi give students a front-row seat into meal prep. “You’re actually going to see the chefs at work,” Mullineaux says. Adding to the atmosphere of the 1,000-seat, 60,000-square-foot space are a balcony overlooking athletics facilities, floor-to-ceiling glass and a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Silver certification.
Terps back in the ’70s preferred using plastic and Styrofoam plates and silverware, considering
Students a generation or two ago had to be careful not to sleep through breakfast when the South Campus Dining Hall opened, or they’d be stuck waiting until the lunchtime slot to eat. But Yahentamitsi continues Dining Services’ “Anytime Dining” option by staying open from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. “It’s a much better solution,” Hipple says. “Whenever
AN INVITING AMBIANCE
As Yahentamitsi Opens, See How Student Dining Has Changed
ACCEPTING APPETITES, ANYTIME
ON THE MALL CAMPUS LIFE 12 TERP.UMD.EDU PHOTOS BY JOHN T. CONSOLI
AMPING UP THE OPTIONS
that more sanitary, says Bart Hipple, assistant director of marketing and communication for Dining Services. Advances in dishwashing technology over the decades have ushered in the more sustainable use of ceramic dishes and glassware.
FOR HUNGRY TERPS , a fresh space to eat is served. This semester, the Yahentamitsi Dining Hall opened in the Heritage Community, which also includes the new Pyon-Chen and Johnson-Whittle residence halls. The name means “a place to go to eat” in the Algonquian language spoken by the Piscataway people, on whose ancestral lands the university stands.
representations of shad (above), an important fish in Piscataway culture ARTWORK COURTESY OF THE PISCATAWAY TRIBE
After the win, Austin Prete M.S. ’22 spent the next year and a half creating a functional aircraft just over a foot across, based on the Elico design. “That first successful flight was an incredible moment,” he says. Among potential advantages the team discovered is less “downwash”—a blast of air that kicks up dirt and debris—than traditional copters.
Columns
Honoring PiscatawaythePeople
representing Piscataway traditions of gathering food from water and land A wall displaying treaties between the Piscataway people and colony, state and federal governments
Yahentamitsi
Columns
Watch Crimson Spin take flight at ter.ps/zob
Artistic
The craft, which garnered broad interest from tech publications, was the culmination of more than two years’ work stemming from UMD’s winning graduate entry, Elico—derived from the common Italian root word for helicopter, propeller, helix and screw—in the society’s Leonardothemed student design competition in 2020.
At a Vertical Flight Society conference early this year, they unveiled their working prototype, Crimson Spin, which flies through the combined lift of four, whirring spiral-shaped blades.
Following the Spring 2022 graduation of the last Elico team members, Maryland engineering faculty plan to turn the project over to new generations of students, helping to give the Renaissance mastermind’s once-futuristic ideas a real future. JENNIFER FIGGINS ROOK
THE FEARLESS GENERATION
displays art, artifacts and other educational materials that represent and raise awareness about the Piscataway, including: A pronunciation guide and definition of A“Yahentamitsi”mapoftheChesapeake Bay highlighting Piscataway villages A mural that reads, “We are still here.”
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“The whole point of the competition was to evaluate whether this old, ancient concept could even work at all,” says Elico team member Ilya Semenov M.S. ’20.
Da Vinci Drone’s New Twist
The “aerial screw”—a human-powered flying machine—has graced a page of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous journals for over 500 years, but never got off the ground. Now, a modern spin on the design by University of Maryland aerospace engineering students and alums has allowed it to finally take flight.
embodying the Seven Grandfathers, which each represent a trait like wisdom, honesty and love
Call it a comeback, redemption or even the greatest season in history, but the 2022 Terps certainly had people talking. Here’s what players, coaches and others around Terp nation had to say about the title.— AK
The second-seeded Terps (19-2) convincingly defeated Duke University and the University of Florida in their first games of the national tournament on their home field. That earned Maryland its 28th spot in a Final Four. But the third-seeded Eagles rallied, scoring the final four goals of the game to edge UMD, 17-16.
“Falling short at the end hurts, but (I’m) super proud of all of these guys and what they’ve done this season,” Head Coach Cathy Reese told Testudo Times.
“I just saw so many kids happy. I saw our parents happy, our administration, our fans, our school, all those people happy, and it’s worth all the sacrifices that you make just because you love to see the tears—the tears of joy, not the tears of pain.”
“Winning titles here looks fun, doesn’t it?”
NCAA Title—and We’ve Got the Final Words (and Tweets) on It
—KEVIN WILLARD, NEW MEN’S BASKETBALL HEAD COACH
“There may never be a men’s lacrosse team in the country as good as this year’s undefeated Maryland championsnational…unless, of course, it’s a future John Tillman-coached Terps team.”
—JOHNNY HOLLIDAY, LONGTIME VOICE OF THE TERRAPINS
—SCOTT VAN PELT ’88, ESPN SPORTSCASTER
Men’s Lacrosse Team Captures
14 TERP.UMD.EDU SPORTS PHOTOS BY ZACH BLAND/MARYLAND ATHLETICS ON THE
TalkMALLAbout ImpressiveanSeason
“Congrats, boys. Seeing that joy up close was memorable. We talked about making the most of the time you had left together. Now you get to remember this for the rest of your time. Heads up @RJ__Bentleys there are some buses headed your way. Act accordingly.”
—BRETT MAKAR, SENIOR DEFENDER
AFTER WINNING the 2022 Big Ten regular-season title and the conference tournament, the Maryland women’s lacrosse team advanced to the NCAA Final Four, where it narrowly lost to Boston College.
WITH ITS 9-7 WIN over Cornell last May before a crowd of 22,184, the top-ranked Maryland men’s lacrosse team
not only claimed a fourth NCAA championship, but also put the cherry on top of a perfect 18-0 season.
The victory made the Terps just the fourth undefeated team in the sport’s NCAA history and the first since 2006. The last squad to accomplish that feat? The Virginia Cavaliers, who thwarted UMD’s perfect season in last year’s title game on the same Rentschler Field in East Hartford, Conn.
Women’s Lacrosse Finishes in Final Four
—JOHN TILLMAN, MEN’S LACROSSE HEAD COACH
“Those guys are gonna be in my wedding one day— just amazing people.”
“I’m proud to now be an alumnus of the greatest lacrosse program in the world.”
—LOGAN WISNAUSKAS, FIFTHYEAR ATTACKER AND 2022 TEWAARATON AWARD WINNER
PROUDEST ACHIEVEMENT Being a dad
He took a timeout with Terp to answer a series of quick Q’s, offering fans a glimpse of what makes him tick. AK
FAVORITE SPORTS MOVIE “Miracle”
Hall University to its fifth appearance in the last six NCAA tournaments, and he has won regular-season and conference tournament titles as well as Big East coach of the year honors in the past six seasons.
But beyond the playbook, he’s fueled by friends, family and maybe a little rock ‘n’ roll— even if he wishes he were better at singing along.
A TALENT I’D LIKE TO HAVE Singing
BEST LIFE DECISION Marrying my wife
MOST PRIZED POSSESSION
PERSONAL MOTTO
Our bronze-medal ball from the 2019 FIBA Pan-American Games. Representing our country (as an assistant coach) was an amazing experience.
I say three words every morning: “Positive people produce.”
A SEASON IS SUCCESSFUL WHEN… Your players are rewarded for their efforts.
15FALL 2022
Head Coach Kevin Willard guides forward Julian Reese in a drill.
Fast Break With New Head Hoops Coach
BEST PREGAME MUSIC AC/DC
THE PERSON I MOST ADMIRE My father
BEST COACHING ADVICE I’VE RECEIVED
When you walk to practice and that’s not the best part of your day, you shouldn’t be in this business.
Get to Know Kevin Willard Through a Rapid-Fire Q&A
I’M HAPPIEST WHEN… I’m just relaxing with my friends and family.
WHEN KEVIN WILLARD flipped on University of Maryland basketball games in the ‘90s, he was struck by the style and confidence that Coach Gary Williams exuded right through the TV screen as he sprinted down the sideline and the TerpsNow,alley-ooped.Willardintends to bring some of that swagger to the squad himself as he prepares for his first season as its head coach. Named to the role in March, he has the resume to get the job done: He most recently guided Seton
GREATEST FEAR Heights
SPORTS TEAM I CHEERED FOR GROWING UP New York Knicks
THE BEST MUSEUMS are such a delight that visitors barely notice they’re leaving with widened perspectives to complement souvenirTraditionalmugs.research
Dean’s Expert Testimony Illuminates Texas “No Guns” Case
A
“A good sign is a product of context,” says Jourdan. How far is a business from the
Museum-based Project Engages Broader Public on Language Science
studies can be quite different for participants—mystifying, maybe a little boring. And rather than knowledge, the takeaway is money or points in a college class.
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A “Word” About Research
“This has to be fun and educational for visitors,” says Charlotte Vaughn, assistant research professor in UMD’s Maryland Language Science Center and leader of the overall project, which is supported by a $470,000 award from the National Science Foundation.
More studies are planned, and the researchers’ broader goals are to expand the diversity of linguistic researchers and develop best practices for meaningful, engaging research in public settings.
PHOTO BY
“We’re exploring how to change participants’ experience for the better while maintaining scientific rigor,” Vaughn says. “Guests are excited to participate in real research during their visit to the museum—research that will result in new findings and knowledge.”—CC
A legal challenge now before the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas is focused on the requirements for posting “no guns” signs. A Houston coffee shop and a church claim the state law requiring property owners to post multiple signs announcing guns aren’t allowed inside privately owned establishments is onerous.
A new partnership between researchers at UMD, Howard and Gallaudet universities and D.C.’s recently launched Planet Word museum mashes up the two experiences, where the learning and fun facilitate the science and extend the study pool beyond campus.Starting this summer, student researchers at the Language Science
s anyone who’s passed the Domino Sugars sign in Baltimore knows, a sign is more than an advertisement in oversized letters and neon lights. It can represent a community’s pride, serve as a neighborhood landmark or make a societal point (as the sugar company did last year when it replaced the neon with climate-friendly LEDs).
Signs of the Times
STEPHANIE S. CORDLE
Dawn Jourdan, dean of UMD’s School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, believes that the rules that require the posting of these signs are unfair–and is testifying to thatJourdan,effect. trained as an urban planner and land-use attorney, aims to improve planning practices by introducing academic research on signage. Her first foray into the field was drafting a model sign code based on engineering research for the International Sign Association; she went on to found the Academic Advisory Council for Signage Research and Education, a think tank that brings together scholars to examine the role of on-premise signs on the urban landscape.
Station lab in Planet Word are inviting guests to participate in several brief studies: one aimed at understanding how knowledge of a subject influences language use, another examining what non-signing people understand about American Sign Language, and a third exploring how the brain guesses what’s next in a sentence.
sizable blocks of text that could interfere with the business’ sight line.
“Passersby can’t see the activity that’s happening in a store or the goods being displayed. Window shopping is limited. Potential patrons can’t see the beautiful pastry counters inside a bakery because there are signs interfering,” Jourdan says. “The police can’t see into the building for the sake of safety.”Jourdan, an expert witness for the plaintiffs, says that a simpler requirement would be both clearer for the reader, requiring less parsing of legalese, and less punitive for the business owner. “That’s what signage is all about: creating the most easy-to-understand messages that can be understood by a lot of people very quickly,” she says.—sl
road? How fast does the traffic move? Is the business standalone or part of a shopping center? Is the business locally owned or does it have a nationally recognized logo? All of these factors must be considered when designing a sign, she says.
speed rates and what could be read at those speeds: Green ones, for example, offer guidance on exits and permitted movements, while blue ones announce weigh stations, rest stops or restaurants. Local governments regulate signs within their jurisdictions. They place constraints on sign size, materials and illumination levels, among other factors.
The Texas case, which was filed in September 2020, challenges both aesthetic and informational requirements. Private properties that want to ban guns are required to display three separate signs: Sections 30.05, 30.06 and 30.07 of the Texas Penal Code, which, respectively, ban all firearms on a property, concealed guns and open carry guns. Each of these codes must be written out in both English and Spanish, and placed near every entrance. The result is three
One of Jourdan’s favorites is the Western Auto sign in Kansas City, which features a circular arrow surrounding red letters spelling out the company’s name and is perched atop its former building. Though the 14-story structure is now home to loft condos, “the sign is part of the visual landscape there,” she says. “It’s part of the history of Kansas City, and so they’ve kept it. It is a beloved landmark.”Thephysical attributes of signs are highly regulated. Highway signs are uniform across the country, based on research about drivers’
17FALL 2022PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY VALERIE MORGAN
Being lonely can literally make you sick— the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day, she says. “We need connection like we need food, water and oxygen,” says Franco. She explores this topic in a University Honors course this fall called “The Loneliness Crisis: Origins and Solutions.”
ASSUME PEOPLE LIKE YOU
EXPLORATIONSEXPLORATIONSON THE MALL 18 TERP.UMD.EDU
they see the same people every day and share the same experiences. “Adults can’t use the same template,” Franco says. She advises choosing an ongoing activity like Ultimate Frisbee or a book club, rather than a one-off networking event or happy hour, to make new friends.
PRUNING IS OK
BE AUTHENTIC
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY CHARLENE PROSSER CASTILLO
Kids make friends easily because
She was inspired by a series of failed romantic relationships, which led her to turn to friends for love and support. “I began to question: Why is romantic love the only love that matters in society? There’s a larger cultural problem around how we don’t value friendship.”
MAKE AN EFFORT
Franco clears up misconceptions and offers the following advice on making friends and maintaining quality friendships.—KS
In New Myths,PsychologistBook,DebunksOffersTips
ORIGINAL PAINTING: AUTOMAT BY EDWARD HOPPER;
A new book called “Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends as an Adult” by Marisa Franco Ph.D. ’17, assistant clinical professor of psychology, could help.
“Everyone is so afraid of being rejected,” she says. “But research shows there’s a phenomenon where when strangers interact, they underestimate how much the person they’re interacting with likesPeoplethem.”who feel spurned become cold and withdrawn, which leads to more rejection—a self-fulfilling prophecy. Go in with positive assumptions and you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
IN AN ERA when nuance is lost in text messages, carefully curated social media posts obscure real life and COVID-19 has limited in-person interactions, genuine friendships might feel more fragile than ever.
How to Adult—andFriendsMakeasanKeepThem
Say your friend’s kid gets into their dream college, but yours didn’t. Avoid a knee-jerk reaction, either downplaying the accomplishment by putting down the school or simply pretending you’re happy. Instead, Franco
advises being honest by saying, “I’m excited for you, but it’s also hard for me because my son didn’t get in.” That will lead to a deeper connection.
“In our 20s, our goal is to expand our sense of who we are. We take on a large roster of friends, people who expose us to different things,” she says. As people age, it’s natural to focus a smaller group, especially as you reach new stages in life such as parenthood, divorce or retire ment, and make friends who reflect those shared experiences.
— CC
Ultimately, Boekeloo says, this sort of training can help mental health providers be more sensitive across the board.
sinuses—where even those fully up to date with shots can be “They’revulnerable.wonderful vaccines that protect people from hospitalization and death, but don’t prevent transmission,” Zhu says.
“The nasal vaccine produces an antibody that stays in the upper respiratory tract to stop transmission, which the intramuscular vaccine does not.”
behavioral and community health in the School of Public Health. “The program helps mental health services organizations identify and change policies, procedures and environments to be more supportive, and helps therapists be more aware and skilled at addressing the unique needs and experiences of LGBTQ+ clients.”
FROM ASSUMING a female patient is married to a man to using incorrectly gendered language in sessions, mental health providers can exacerbate what is often already a fraught experience for the LGBTQ+
“We regularly see news stories that COVID is bouncing back again,” he says. “I think this has to do with needing an approach that can stop transmission.”
Inhaled Vaccine Creates Immunity Where It’s Most Needed
Zhu and colleagues had been developing the method to fight flu, but quickly began adapting it to COVID even before a pandemic was declared. They’ve since conducted two rounds of animal trials, recording high levels of effectiveness, and are prepared to begin human clinical trials even as they start work on an improved second-gener ation vaccine. It’s time for society to think again about which vaccines to prioritize—and perhaps follow our noses, Zhu suggests.
based on the body’s own mechanism for transporting substances like vaccines across cellular barriers.
Xiaoping Zhu, a professor of veterinary medicine, has developed an inhalable coro navirus vaccine that goes directly to work in the parts of the body—like the nose and
Training Program Aims to Improve Mental Health Treatment
19FALL 2022ILLUSTRATIONS BY VALERIE MORGAN
LF
“This program for a therapist is reorienting your brain from a lifetime of scripting in terms of language, values, perceptions, instincts and expectations related to sexuality and gender,” says Bradley Boekeloo, the center’s director and a professor of
GETTING THAT JAB —or a succession of them—has been the main weapon against serious COVID-19 complications since late 2020, but if a UMD researcher succeeds, all those needles could give way to a few quick sniffs.
Right in the Nose
A New “Script” for LGTBQ+ Patient Caregivers
The program, rooted in previous efforts to develop HIV prevention and sexual risk interventions in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., has already trained 25 therapists in the past year through workshops, technical assistance and regular clinical consultations.
“Some of the basic principles actually can benefit any client,” he says.
The nasal vaccine has other advantages, he says, like stability at room temperature, raising the possibility of mailing vaccines to people’s homes as a primary vaccination or booster to help tamp down outbreaks. It also doesn’t rely on live or attenuated virus—making it safe for children and the immunocompromised—but instead uses a patented, engineered protein
Throughcommunity.thenew
Sexual and Gender Diversity Learning Community program, the University of Maryland Prevention Research Center is trying to address that with a training regimen researchers hope to turn into a national model to help people who disproportionately experience mental health challenges but are often stigmatized in medical environments.
Calvo, who honed his approach analyzing social media from political and environmental crises in Latin America, started with a list of about 400 verified users who tweet on relevant topics. He and his team deepened the collection by drawing on connections and followers so that millions of tweets per day now feed theKnowingsystem. who to exclude—accounts started the day before the invasion, for
rom searing images of mass killings by Russian forces to accounts of families struggling to flee frontline fighting, journalists have created a kaleidoscopic view of the suffering that has engulfed Ukraine since Russia invaded—but the news media can’t be everywhere.Socialmedia faces no such limitations, however, and a University of Maryland researcher is part of a U.S.-Ukrainian multi-institutional team harvesting data from Twitter and analyzing it with machine-learning algorithms. The
The project, Data for Ukraine, sprang to life in mid-March, and has shown itself able to reveal important events a few hours ahead of Western or even Ukrainian media sources. In one instance, its tracking of civilian resistance and human rights abuses immediately identified the beginning of a major event—Russian forces firing on peaceful protesters in the southern
ON THE MALL EXPLORATIONSEXPLORATIONS 20 TERP.UMD.EDU
System Analyzes Millions of Tweets Daily to Quickly Pinpoint Atrocities, Refugee Flows
SERVIO KUUB/UNSPLASH
PHOTO BY RODRIGO ABD/AP; PAINTING BY
F
city of Kherson—that registered as a spike on one of the main graphs on the project’s public website. The group is also providing reports to a range of nonprofit and governmental organizations seeking to aid refugees and track war crimes.
result is a real-time system that maps out humanitarian needs, displaced people, civilian resistance and human rights violations—constructed from the accounts of people in the path of the war.
“It’s an early alarm system for human rights abuses,” says Ernesto Calvo, professor of government and politics and director of UMD’s Interdisciplinary Lab for Computational Social Science. “For it to work, we need to know two basic things: what is happening or being reported, and who is reporting those things.”Heand his lab focus on the second of those two requirements, and constructed a “community detection” system to identify important groups of Twitter users from which to use data.
Big Data “Early Alarm” for Ukraine Abuses
21FALL 2022ILLUSTRATION BY VALERIE MORGAN
“It’s also about honoring who they are and their cultures, and acknowledging the assets that they bring,” she says. “They have a transnational perspective most students don’t. The migrant experience teaches you a lot.”—CC
At Journey’s End, a Warmer Welcome
“Social scientists have a duty in a time of crisis—if they have special or technical knowledge that can be useful— to use it,” she says. “Even if they can’t directly save human lives, they can use it to record what happened.”—cc
Researcher Studies How Schools Can Better Integrate Young Unaccompanied Migrants
“The objective was not to capture as much data as possible, but to make sure it’s quality data,” he says.
THOUSANDS OF UNACCOMPANIED immigrant youths arrive in Maryland each year, and even school district personnel charged with helping them succeed in their new lives sometimes can’t see beyond what they lack.
“These kids are more than their levels of English proficiency,” says Sophia Rodriguez, an assistant professor in the College of Education who researches educational equity and inclusion for mostly high school-age newcomers to the U.S. from Central America. They often arrive alone or have been long separated from their Definingfamilies.themsimply by their educa tional deficits can lead to excesses like marathon English-as-a-second-language classes that isolate them socially and may cost them valuable contextual languagelearning opportunities, she says.
students navigate not only classrooms but often-complex school enrollment procedures; protecting students at the district level from rising anti-immigrant sentiment; and training attention on the trauma children can experience during migration—from enduring or witnessing violence to inhumane detention proce dures in the U.S.
instance, or with few long-term connections—is key, Calvo says.
Other team members hail from Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Kyiv School of Economics; another, Olga Onuch of the University of Manchester, U.K., a Ukrainian associate professor of politics, helped guide the initial selection of Twitter accounts and shape the list of more than 600 Ukrainian and Russian keywords the system monitors for. It captures “living language,” she says—for instance, a protest might be referred to in Ukrainian or Russian with the Soviet-era colloquialism of “a meeting.”Onuch says the work can help aid agencies direct resources to people fleeing fighting and, in the long term, provide documentation of abuses and atrocities for eventual justice.
Rodriguez was awarded $350,000 as a William T. Grant Scholar this year to study ways to reduce structural barriers to educational equality for these youths in three Maryland school districts—a project she plans to expand to schools around the mid-Atlantic region in coming years. Among her recommendations: hiring social workers along with more bilingual aides and other staff to help
FACULTY Q&A MOLINA
As a broadcaster, I didn’t have the ability to go deep into questions, like, “Why did this event occur?” Or: “Why was it so difficult to predict correctly?” Or: “Are we going to see more such events in the future?” But after I was working in broadcasting, I could see career opportunities that I couldn’t before.
PHOTO
— CC
What was Andrew like for a small child?
What led to your career change?
Fresh off a project scientist position at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Molina started this fall as an assistant professor of atmospheric and oceanic science as part of UMD’s FAMILE initiative, a $40 million investment to help attract tenure-track faculty from diverse backgrounds. She spoke to Terp about her path from “Fox & Friends” personality to data scientist studying Earth’s changing climate with cuttingedge artificial intelligence.
BY JOHN T. CONSOLI
How do you envision your role as a Hispanic female researcher?
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New Professor Left Cable News for Climate Data Science
Flipping the Channel
I remember asking, “What’s a hurricane? What’s happening?” and my parents being not quite sure how to answer and seeming scared. That’s terrifying as a kid. That communication aspect stuck with me—I wanted to make sure that people are empowered to make good decisions about safety. From the storm, I remember the noises, windows shattering, and water coming through the door.
By her early 20s, she was helping millions do so as a Fox News meteorologist; then, after six years at the network, she traded on-set banter for a deeper dive into the science that fascinated
MARIA
I get really excited to think that I have a career where I can ask these important questions and use the tools of data science—machine learning, neural networks—to think and explore and create knowledge. My identity doesn’t really come into that. But if I get an email—“I saw you talk in my class; it’s refreshing to see a fellow Latina in the position you’re in”—that touches my heart. We must continue to work on representation.
What drew you initially to broadcasting instead of research?
MARIA J. MOLINA was 5 years old when Hurricane Andrew sliced across South Florida and roared over her frightened family’s home. The fierce winds that made it the costliest storm in U.S. history at the time also propelled her toward a career focused on understanding extreme weather.
her, resigning in 2016 to pursue doctoral studies.
My family did not have experience with graduate school. I didn’t know what being a researcher meant. We emigrated from Nicaragua because of civil unrest when I was 1 year old. We would watch meteorologists on the Spanish news, and that was something tangible. I couldn’t imagine myself as a researcher because there was a lack of visible Hispanic women researchers.
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MARGARET A. WALKER COORDINATOR, ART EDUCATION/ ARTS INTEGRATION, COLLEGE OF EDUCATION
“The Simpsons” monorail episode is brilliant satire of large-scale transit infrastructure projects. It captures the public’s fascination with mega projects, along with the less savory dynamics of public-private partnerships, path dependency and bureaucratic inertia, and exorbitant spending on boondoggle projects.
ENGINEERING, A.
What’s the best or worst fictionalized depiction your field in film, TV or a book?
of
The 1993 docudrama “And the Band Played On,” based on the 1987 bestseller “And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic” by Randy Shilts, was fictionalized, but the epidemiologic techniques were so on point for investigating a new disease outbreak that I had my undergraduate epi students watch it as a class assignment.
PROFESSOR OF AEROSPACE JAMES
JESSICA VITAK
CLARK SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING —
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ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF URBAN PLANNING, SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, PLANNING AND PRESERVATION
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Best: The episode “Spider” from the HBO series “From the Earth to the Moon.” It showed the engineering design and development cycle for the Apollo Lunar Module from beginning to end, realistically and accurately. Worst: “Armageddon.” If there was any way they could make another technical error, they took it.
PROFESSOR OF FIRE PROTECTION ENGINEERING, A. JAMES CLARK SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR AND HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION LAB DIRECTOR, COLLEGE OF INFORMATION STUDIES
DAVID AKIN
23FALL 2022 THE QUESTIONBIG
“Minority Report” is quite prescient—and one of the scarier takes. It details a future where a “precrime” police unit detects crimes before they’re committed and arrests the future criminals. People reside in a surveillance state, where constant biometric scans make anonymity nearly impossible. The movie also raises important ethical questions around whether intent and action are the same.
Suggest a future question at terpfeedback.umd.edu
Pretty much every depiction of an artist or art teacher in the media is terrible and inaccurate, parodied perfectly by the character Geoffrey Jellineck in the show “Strangers With Candy”: “I’m the art teacher. I may be an authority
—
PETER SUNDERLAND
Share your answer and see more faculty responses at terp.umd.edu/BigQ15
In “No Country for Old Men,” Anton Chigurh opens the gas tank of a car, inserts a gasoline-soaked rag and ignites it. Soon, the car explodes. This is completely unrealistic because the head space in a gasoline tank is far too rich to explode.
PHOTO COLLAGE BY LAUREN BIAGINI
PAMELA I. CLARK RESEARCH PROFESSOR EMERITA OF BEHAVIORAL AND COMMUNITY HEALTH, SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH
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ARIEL BIERBAUM
CoalVeins
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It was still a boom time for people living among the mountains laced with pure and shiny anthracite coal, prized for heating, manufacturing and steam production. A sliver of Pennsylvania was providing more than 15% of America’s energy, increasing wages and finally giving the brigades of miners who toiled underground the chance to put away small savings. Profits took their toll in blood, however; in 1910, 59,000 employees in Luzerne County dug up almost 29 million tons of coal, but more than 200 of them died in mine accidents.
He had turned a chance meeting with a dress maker named Catherine on a streetcar into a marriage that had given them 2-year-old Mary and 3-month-old Florence. They wed despite the disapproval of Catherine’s mother, a native of Ireland whose own miner husband had died in 1898; now the owner of a paid-off house, she suspected Walsh was only interested in her daughter for her modest wealth.
the son of irish immigrants, Thomas Walsh was orphaned as a child but was 38 years old and supporting a young family of his own by the time he started his shift at a northeastern Pennsylvania coal mine on May 3, 1911.
In a fresh project collecting oral histories of newer Hazleton arrivals for a state operated museum, Shackel hopes to show the historical, cultural and socioeconomic connections spanning ethnic groups and hundreds of years of history.
while growing up on Long Island in the 1970s, Shackel thought he would be an architect until he spent a college summer in Illinois doing archaeolog ical work. Up at 5 a.m. for nine weeks, he surveyed an American Indian village site and burial mounds in preparation for a major interstate project.
BY LIAM FARRELL PHOTOS BY STEPHANIE S. CORDLE
Those same concerns animate the work of Paul Shackel, a professor in the UMD Department of Anthropology who has spent
Miners pause before descending into a Hazleton, Pa., coal mine in 1905. While coal increased in profitability during that era, it was also extremely dangerous for its workers.
“We all have commonalities,” he says.
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years exploring the history, culture and mod ern-day transformation of Luzerne County and its second-largest city, Hazleton. While Shackel’s work there initially centered on century-old events, he was also pulled in by the transformation of an area once dominated by deindustrialization and population decline into a critical goods-distribution network dependent on an exponentially increasing Latino population. He confronted age-old American questions: Who belongs and who doesn’t, who’s working hard and who isn’t, who’s making a place better and who’s dragging it down.
“I almost didn’t want to come back home,” Shackel says. “It was a new adventure.”
While working after graduate school for the National Park Service in Harper’s Ferry, he attended a conference in Hazleton about the 100th anni versary of the Lattimer Massacre. In what Shackel has called “one of the most trou bling, yet forgotten, moments in U.S. history,” deputies fired on striking Polish, Slovak and Lithuanian coal miners on Sept. 10, 1897, killing 19 and wounding 38. Intrigued by the relative obscurity of the event and
Waves of immigrants have long clashed in Pennsylvania coal country, where a UMD anthropologist is digging into the commonalities between old and new.
I’ve often thought about how it was not only a familial tragedy but also a moment when our family tree might have been cut off at the roots. It inspired my academic studies on the double-edged promise of immigration, as well as the need to resist the chauvinistic temptation to wield it as evidence that “we” had it harder than anyone who followed, or somehow have a more legiti mate claim to this country.
LEFT: PHOTO VIA LIBRARY RIGHT: PHOTO COURTESY OF LIAM FARRELL
OF CONGRESS;
Thomas Walsh (left), the author’s great-grandfather, was killed in a mine accident in northeastern Pennsylvania.
Walsh, my great-grandfather, would share their fate on that cold spring day.
The textile industry provided an economic cushion at first, both for the region and for Catherine, who con tinued to work as a seamstress while widowed and wholly responsible for a toddler and baby. When her mother died in 1914, she and a brother inher ited the family duplex, a rare safety net that perhaps saved them.
VIEW COMPANY, VIA LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Children of miners play near their homes in Hazleton, Pa., while surrounded by coal debris. Generations of European immigrants cycled into the industry before it collapsed in the mid-20th century.
He also discovered that at the memorial dedication ceremony, the famed Mexican American labor and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez asked the audience to see the connections between the struggles of the European miners and those of Latino migrant farmers.“They too are immigrants. They too have strange sounding names. They too speak a foreign language,” Chavez said. “We know only too well of the hardship and sacrifice of these mine workers because together there is another group of workers who have things in common.”
derivations of his grandmother’s last name in local cemeteries—residents also “looked like my relatives,” he says—he returned a decade later. Along with a graduate student and volunteers, he found the site of the massacre and some evidence left behind, including four bullets and a miner’s tin cup with holes from a shotgun blast.
in the way that official documents often bleach out visceral detail, my great-grandfather’s death certificate simply says “killed by a fall of rock.”
By the time I graduated high school in 2000, however, fewer than 1,000 miners were working to extract 4 million tons of coal that year, and surveys on health and well-being from agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ranked northeast Pennsylvania at the bottom of American metropolitan areas. According to U.S. Census data, Luzerne County today still has a higher disability and poverty rate than the national average, with a median household income that is 18% below and a nine-point deficit in residents with at least a bachelor’s degree.
That economic stagnation invited a political reckoning.
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It had taken until Sept. 10, 1972, for a memorial to be dedicated to the Lattimer victims. Coal operators, Shackel says, had little interest in pro moting anything that could rally labor. Surviving protestors found themselves blacklisted, and a jury acquitted the sheriff and his deputies after only a half hour of deliberations; the miners, according to the defense attorney, were
The 1911 Department of Mines of Pennsylvania report—which notes fatal ities’ nationality, occupation, age, and number of widows and orphans—says he and Charles Notari, a 23-year-old single Italian laborer, died at the cham ber’s face, the frontline of digging.
living up to their peoples’ histories of “mischief and destruction.”
LEFT PHOTO: KEYSTONE
of production. Anthracite, which was already dangerous to reach because of its deep, narrow and twisted veins, became even more costly as workers had to burrow farther underground, leaving the market vulnerable to competition from oil, natural gas and hydroelectric power.
An article in the May 4, 1911, edition of the Pittston Gazette said it took two hours for the “badly mangled” remains to be unearthed—“Mr. Walsh was a man of exemplary habits and was well liked by all who knew him”—and were given to “Undertaker O’Malley.” But according to family lore, officials from the Pennsylvania Coal Company uncer emoniously left Walsh’s body on the kitchen floor, saying, “There he is.”
For miners who survived, economic fortunes were robust for only a few more years. The region reached its peak around World War I, when investors started buying up mining operations as tax shelters and assets for sale instead
Florence grew up and married my grandfather, William Farrell, in 1937; by that time, men in northeastern Pennsylvania had started commuting to New Jersey to work at factories. My grandparents followed so William, a trained dental technician, could open a laboratory in East Orange and eventu ally raise four sons, including my late father, Thomas. A generation later, their nine grandchildren were on the way to achieving college degrees and white-collar jobs.
“When all that’s settled, then we can think about helping others,” one resident told Bradlee. “I mean, people in this country need help too, don’t they?”Today, a large banner hangs from a house not far from the Lattimer Massacre memorial: “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Trump.”
—BODE MORIN, SITE ADMINISTRATOR OF ANTHRACITE HERITAGE MUSEUM AND ECKLEY MINERS’ VILLAGE
“We are not a bunch groups.individualofWeareoneculture.”
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Francisco Torres-Aranda, a local businessman who now represents the Hazleton area on the Pennsylvania Governor’s Advisory Commission on Latino Affairs, says the language requirement was “where it went too far.”
arrivals set up utilities and navigate government processes. She remembers snide comments in grocery stores and shouts from passing cars to go back to her “own country.”
originally from the Domini can Republic, Annie Mendez was living in New Jersey 20 years ago with her two children and working as a paralegal when her boyfriend at the time wanted to open an auto repair business in Hazleton.“Wewere in need of opportunities,” she says. “Life was getting expensive.”
Mendez, who was interviewed for the oral history project, had good English language skills and helped new
While a U.S. Court of Appeals ultimately overturned that law in 2010, Hazleton fell under a microscope again when reporters and writers fanned across the country to find an expla nation for President Donald Trump’s unexpected election. Luzerne County had voted for President Barack Obama by eight points in 2008 and five in 2012, but it swung decisively to Trump by 20 points in 2016. (President Joe Biden, who was born in Scranton, was bested in 2020 by about 14 points.) One resulting book was Ben Bradlee Jr.’s “The Forgotten,” which catalogued how frustrated working-class nostal gia, local political corruption and pure racism combined to support reaction ary immigration rhetoric and policy.
The city infamously passed an ordi nance in 2006 to deny business permits to employers who hired illegal immi grants and to fine landlords renting to
Anthropology Professor Paul Shackel, right, speaks with Victor Perez following an interview for the oral history project. Perez is president of the Dominican House of Hazleton, a social services agency in the city’s downtown.
them. It also made English the official language, prohibiting government documents from being translated into Spanish without the city’s approval.
Renting a five-bedroom house in the Pennsylvania city cost only $350 a month at the time, she remembers. Jobs were available at warehouses and distribution centers for companies such as Office Depot, Amazon, American Eagle, Bimbo bakeries and Coca-Cola, sparking a reversal of my grandpar ents’ internal American journey: First-, second- and-third generation immi grants in New York and New Jersey flocked anew to the anthracite region. In 2006, about 30% of Hazleton’s 31,000 residents identified as Latino; about a decade later, it was nearly half.
“The majority of the people in Hazleton weren’t here illegally,” TorresAranda says. “It became obvious what the motivation was. The motivation was to create animosity.”
and participated in three of Shackel’s projects.“Itdefinitely helped with the gap between the populations,” he says. “(History) can be used to better under stand each other.”
The new oral history effort under way with Scranton’s Anthracite Heritage Museum continues in that direction. While today the brick-andmortar museum has information on
European immigration and artifacts like mule carts and a child laborer’s beat-up hobnail boots, it plans to add a digital collection of interviews with Latino immigrants by the end of the year. The changing nature of the anthracite region is not just an oppor tunity to engage with a new population, says Bode Morin, site administrator of the museum and Eckley Miners’ Village, but also to show how it has continually developed and evolved.
“It gives you a sense of where you come from,” she says. “You think you are different in a cer tain way, but you’re really not.”
Signs in downtown Hazleton for businesses and community events show the blend of immigrants.
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“We are not a bunch of indi vidual groups,” he says. “We are one Ginaculture.”Romancheck person ally knows the value of such work. Shackel’s excavation of her great-aunts’ home brought her family’s everyday experi ence back to life, from seeds to grow their own vegetables to stockings that could be knotted into rugs. The new project could do the same for younger Latino immigrants, she says, as well as show older white resi dents how alike they are.
—AMILCAR ARROYO (FACING PAGE), LUZERNE COUNTY RESIDENT AND SPANISH-LANGUAGE MAGAZINE PUBLISHER
as he put it in his book, “Remem bering Lattimer,” Shackel’s scholarly goal is to show how immigrants across time and ethnicities have been ani mated by “universal values that we all want and desire—such as peace, good health, education and the ability to sustainBeforeoneself.”theCOVID-19 pandemic, Shackel conducted excavations at Eckley Miner’s Village, a restored coal town, as well as in Lattimer and nearby Pardeesville. Joining with the Hazleton Integration Project, a nonprofit working to build local relationships across ethnic lines, Shackel also brought together Hazleton high schoolers of white and Hispanic backgrounds for the digs. One of them was Cesar Dadus, now a Bloomsbury University student who immigrated to Hazleton from the Dominican Republic with his family
“I would like to be alive to see Hazleton working together. That’s my dream.”
One day, I drove north to look for the mine where Walsh was killed, with the help of a 1926 map provided by the Luzerne County Historical Society. The closest I could get among thick brush, trees and signs warning against trespassing was a rusty gate in front of a seemingly abandoned construc tion site. But there were also plenty of modest and pleasant houses with children’s toys in the yards. Across from where the entrance would have been in 1911, the parking lots of a glass manufacturer and a wheelchair and disability product supplier were full.
Things, indeed, have a way of changing. terp
Spanish-language magazine in Hazleton. He used to pick tomatoes and work in a phone book factory; today, a painting (left, background) of long-ago coal miners hangs behind his desk as a reminder of the region’s history.
like New York City’s Washington Heights or East Harlem neighborhoods in the early 2000s than a stereotypical vision of an aging coal town. There is still an Italian restaurant called Vesuvio’s and a law office with partners named Ustynoski and Marusak but they are dwarfed by Dominican cuisine, professional services advertising in Spanish and even a Latino religious supply store known as a botánica.
The city is now 57% Hispanic and 39% white, and the main drags of downtown resemble something more
Listening to Arroyo proudly show pictures of his young grandson, I’m of course reminded of my own grandmother. While my grandfather died 12 days after I turned 3, “Flossie,” as relatives and friends called her, was a warm and loving presence in my life until she died in 2003. She traveled with us on vacations and came along when I first moved to college, yet I never heard a word about her father’s death or saw any outward trace of what would have been justified sadness, bitterness or anger; the only remonstrance I ever remember getting from her was gentle chiding after I grumbled about heading back to middle school at the end of one summer. “Things have a way of changing,” she would say to complaints and difficulties.
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“They are my inspiration … This is the Latino, but 100 years ago,” he says. “I would like to be alive to see Hazleton working together. That’s my dream.”
on a blazing july morning, downtown Hazleton slowly awakens as Shackel and two graduate students, Aryn Neurock Schriner of UMD and Aubrey Edwards of the University of Wyoming, begin their first interview for the oral history project, which is funded by a seed grant from the UMD College of Behavioral and Social Sciences Dean’s Research Initiative and in-kind support from the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.
The cultures mingle more easily in the office of Amilcar Arroyo, who came to the United States from Peru in the 1980s and publishes a
THE
Seafood company owner Casey Todd (steering boat) prepares to dump tens of thousands of oyster shells near Crisfield, Md., to help young oysters thrive on the Chesapeake Bay bottom.
OYSTERSMARYLAND’SBATTLEMODERNFOR
BY CHRIS CARROLL PHOTOS BY JOHN T. CONSOLI
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Pirates plundered and diseases decimated the Chesapeake’s bounty, but UMD researchers are wielding AI and robotics to save a struggling industry.
PHOTO BY STEPHANIE S. CORDLE
Central to this comeback, the researchers believe, is the adaptation of technologies revolutionizing land-based agriculture. So-called “precision farming” often uses robotic aerial drones mounted with sensors to scan fields for factors like topography and soil content, giving farmers data to plan seeding or harvesting schedules, or apply fertilizers in exact amounts where needed.
Hunched over his laptop, Rajasekaran says, “The idea is: The sonar can see the oysters through the turbid water from a distance although with low resolution, while the camera has high resolution, but can only see the oysters close up—so we plan to use both,” he says. With all that and a type of artificial intelligence known as machine learning, Yu and collaborators are teaching a computer system to recognize sonar signatures of marketable oysters in the project funded by a $10 million USDA grant. One day, a drone—even a swarm of them—could zoom through an area and quickly provide an oyster farmer with a map showing a host of metrics, including where oysters are ready to harvest, where they’re immature, and empty zones.
The need for such data is why her student, Rajasekaran, is out in a boat on this steamy June morning. He and his research partner for the day, Alan Williams, a master’s student studying with fisheries scientist and project co-leader Matthew Gray of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, are trying to direct the robots to gather visual and sonar imagery of oysters.
“Oh my God! There!” Rajasekaran shouts. “I think it’s an oyster! Or is it a rock?”
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“The shellfish industry in the Chesapeake Bay is mostly using the same technology from 200 years ago, with most things done very laboriously by hand,” she says. “It has not evolved, not adapted like terrestrial farming.” Decisions as basic as where to plant oyster larvae and steer a boat to find fully grown ones are still based on intuition
and experience, rather than objective data.
The glare on the surface of the Choptank River, the green murk below and strong gusts stirring up the mile-and-a-half-wide channel all leave Keshav Rajasekaran Ph.D. ’22 struggling in an open boat to control a pair of underwater drones as they skitter along the bottom, or noisily emerge with propellers spraying saltwater.
The latter is what Rajasekaran and Williams have stumbled into— an inconvenience that illustrates the overall problem they hope to help solve. Richie Long, a staffer at the Horn Point Lab who’s captaining the boat today, steers it slowly around a several-acre oyster “lease” held by a Maryland waterman happy to provide an area for testing. At one point, the two students’ excitement rises.
The mechanical engineering student peels off his T-shirt. Not to tan or take a dip—he just needs to be able to see. He secures one end around his head with a ball cap and drapes the other over a laptop he’s using to monitor the microwave oven-size aquatic drones fitted with optical and acoustic sensors. In the makeshift shade, Rajasekaran spots an empty riverbed.
The goal of the University of Maryland-led project for which he’s gathering data today is a Chesapeake Bay that—instead of being barren—practically bursts with oysters. Researchers in the project funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) envision a future when the bivalve mollusks again approach numbers they did when explorer John Smith had to carefully navigate around jagged oyster reefs protruding from the water in the bay and tributaries like the Choptank 400 years ago. But that abundance—and many of the water-quality benefits these natural filters bring—has disappeared amid overharvesting, misman agement and devastating diseases.
Overall project leader Miao Yu, a mechanical engineering profes sor whose specialty is robotic sensing, says Maryland’s archaic oyster trade needs modern methods to augment its traditions.
It’s a rough day for robots.
“Sand, sand, sand,” he mutters in frustration.
33FALL 2022ILLUSTRATION BY SCHELLL AND HOGAN / HARPER’S WEEKLY, 1884
Pitched gun battles erupted on the bay between the police and the pirates, Webster says. Some vessels carried cannons and rifles, killings were commonplace, and outraged oystermen plotted assassinations of rivals and officials.
As zoologist and Johns Hopkins University Professor William K. Brooks declared in “The Oyster,” his 1891 natural history of the species written as oyster populations were approaching collapse, “(F)or many years we strove to hide even from ourselves, that our indifference and lack of foresight, and our blind trust in our natural advantages, have brought this grand inheritance to the verge of ruin.”
By the late 1800s, some 15 million bushels of oysters a year were being pulled from the Maryland section of the bay, each holding perhaps 275 oysters. By comparison, this year’s Maryland oyster har vest—the biggest in 35 years, likely thanks to favorable weather—was about 540,000 bushels, or less than 4% of the historical high.
Most oysters, however, are more modest fare—sold with meat removed and packed for use in various dishes. A revival could make them economically akin to poultry, which was once too pricey to serve on every table, says Don Webster, a University of Maryland Extension principal agent focused on aquaculture, and one of the co-leaders of the USDA and NSF project. “As I tell my growers, ‘I want to see Wendy’s, Popeye’s and Burger King arguing over who’s got the best oyster sandwich,’” he says.
Keshav Rajasekaran Ph.D. ’22 (facing page) prepares to launch an underwater robot to seek oysters. Mechanical engineering Professor Miao Yu (left) oversees the project to modernize shellfish aquaculture. Oyster “pirates” (above) fought pitched battles on the bay with Maryland’s “Oyster Navy” in the 19th century.
Even some Maryland watermen complained of overzealous polic ing by the navy, which later became the Maryland Natural Resources Police. But with the nation’s hunger for oysters growing, nothing could stop the mayhem, or the enormous harvest.
Viewed solely through the lens of the present, oysters are an odd proposition: slick, silvery flesh in a shell with a taste that causes many people to reach for the Tabasco (while others extol their subtle flavor differences). On the half shell, they can command ludicrous prices, given that a raw bar chef simply pops them open and makes one quick cut before serving them as it’s been done on riverbanks and around campfires for thousands of years—still alive and slurped from the shell.
As related in historian John R. Wennerstein’s “The Oyster Wars of the Chesapeake Bay,” Maryland passed laws in the mid-1800s against out-of-state oysterers—“plundering Yankee drudgers,” as they were called. And yet the rapacious dredging continued. In 1868, Maryland established a watergoing police force, nicknamed “The Oyster Navy,” to stop unlawful harvesting by oyster pirates.
food staple consumed by people of all classes—so common that leftovers were sometimes spread on fields as fertilizer and shells used to build roads and even create new land in the bay. (It’s the foundation for parts of Crisfield and other cities.) In Maryland, they became part of the bedrock of the young state’s economy as local watermen plied the fertile oyster beds with hand tongs, emulating the technique used by Native tribes of the region.Buta trio of new technologies—refrigeration, railroads and canning—emerged in the early to mid-1800s, and oysters exploded in popularity as they became available beyond coastal areas. The bounty of the seemingly inexhaustible Chesapeake caught the notice of distant mariners who had stripped their own waters clean.
“Northerners, who had largely depleted their local oyster beds, looked at those down here like the gold fields of California, and they brought the towed dredge from New England,” Webster says. “That changedPulledeverything.”behindChesapeake sailing vessels, the teethed dredges efficiently tore through oyster beds and scooped big loads up to the surface at a rate far exceeding what watermen with tongs could accomplish. Soon the Chesapeake was undergoing a transformation.
If this sounds unlikely, rewind 200 years. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, oysters were not a connoisseur’s item, but a national
“After I graduated from college and started working with my father in 1978, the landings were well over a million bushels a year,” says Casey Todd, owner and operator of MeTompkin Bay Oyster Company in Crisfield, Md. “Then before long, because of the disease, it dropped to 150,000 bushels.”
“The water around here isn’t clear—you can’t see or judge the shape
34 TERP.UMD.EDU UNDERWATER CAMERA VIEW COURTESY OF KESHAV RAJASEKARAN
The company started by his father—the late Ira Todd ’39, who grad uated with a UMD business degree—never stopped shucking oysters, even when live, edible ones were few and far between.
As the 20th century began drawing to a close, a new disaster was creeping up the Chesapeake from warmer waters: two diseases, Haplosporidium nelsoni and Perkinsus marinus, which are popularly known as MSX and dermo, respectively. They are harmless to humans, but kill oysters in the shell before they reach marketable size.
of your beds,” he says. “So if there’s a way to know what’s on my beds without going around taking a bite here and bite there with a pair of tongs, I’m interested.”
More robust management helped tame the crazed harvesting, and Maryland oystermen brought in 2 to 3 million bushels annually from 1930 until the 1980s, supporting dozens of shucking houses and pack ing plants along with thousands of families involved in the seafood trade in rural working waterfront communities.
Oyster visibility is the project’s first order of business, but the combined USDA and NSF projects could one day lead to a range of revolutionary practices, Yu says: underwater robots planting tiny oys ters growing on shells, or “spat,” in perfect spots, or harvesting with delicate precision that takes only viable shellfish and leaves growing ones and the bay bottom undisturbed. “People think we’re dreaming if we mention all that,” she admits.
Another aspect of the project, led by bioengineering Professor Yang Tao, is examining how to plot perfect dredging paths to avoid immature oysters while using as little fuel as possible. Other collabo rators hail from the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, Louisiana State University, Pacific Shellfish Institute, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Georgia Tech and the Greater
Tongs (far left) are a traditional method of Maryland’s oystermen for plying their trade.
The towed dredge (below), demonstrated by seafood company owners Nick Hargrove (at left) and Benny Horseman, is a faster way to harvest, but is more destructive.
An underwater view from a robot (left) could help map out exactly where to pull a dredge to minimize damage to young oysters and the bay bottom.
Todd has traveled the country to see how oyster farming works elsewhere, and he envies producers in the Pacific Northwest who can saunter out across exposed oyster beds when the tide drops, and even harvest that way. But Maryland oyster beds 10 to 20 feet down might as well be in a trench, they’re so hard to see.
Harvesting here means dredging with care—not with the devilmay-care destructiveness of 19th-century “drudgers.” But dragging the 3-and-a-half-feet-wide device where it doesn’t belong can still kill young oysters, he says, and sometimes there’s no way to avoid it.
seed oyster spat in public oyster beds, as well as provide the service to those who lease oystering grounds.
During the summer, Maryland’s public oyster grounds are closed, but those like Hargrove with private leases can harvest oysters, so the two head down Harris Creek in a classic Chesapeake Bay fishing boat known as a deadrise, fitted with a crane and winch. Hargrove pulls a lever to drop his dredge off the starboard side, and soon the small boat is straining to pull the dredge across the rough bottom, gunwale dip ping near the surface. He stops to reel in a load that he and Horseman dump onto a table on the deck.
“We’re young, we’re in this for the long haul, we want to succeed, we want the whole industry to succeed,” Hargrove says, rapid-fire. “So yeah, we need technology. We need modernization. We need to be able to see what we’ve got.” terp MARYLAND DEPARTMENT RESOURCES
College Park-based Fraunhofer Center for Experimental Software Engineering. Together, the technologies could be applied to other types of seafood, from mussels to crabs.
1 870 20201930 )MILLIONS(INBUSHELS 1970 14M16M12M10M8M6M4M2M0 35FALL 2022
On the last day of June, Horseman drives about 20 miles northwest to tiny Wittman, Md., located on a peninsula on the bay just west of the Eastern Shore tourist town of St. Michaels, to meet with his competitor and friend, Nick Hargrove. He’s another uncharacteris tically young business operator in what’s increasingly an aging trade, managing his family’s Wittman Wharf Seafood company, which like Horseman’s, launched in recent years in a formerly shuttered facility.
“I think I might be the youngest lunatic in this business,” he chuckles.Inaddition to buying from watermen, the company operates a small fleet of boats and participates in a state-sponsored program to
OF NATURAL
Bennie Horseman, 33-year-old co-owner of Madison Bay Seafood, points to the hallway outside the business office of the facility he and his brother renovated and operate next to the Little Choptank River. “There was a tree growing right there when we took over the building,” he says. The historic oyster shucking house had been abandoned and overrun by foliage since the ’80s, when dermo and MSX began their rampage in Maryland.
Aloimonos and students are working on a parallel path to Yu; rather than focusing on incorporating sonar to extend sensory capabilities, he’s incorporating AI to create a vision system able to spot live oysters while disregarding dead ones. His team too has struggled with the availability of research footage of oysters, so it created a workaround with AI-simulated imagery. “I can show you real oysters and simu lated ones, and (the viewer) can’t tell the difference,” he says. “It gives us much more latitude to train our system.”
To Webster, advanced aquaculture technologies could completely reshape the Maryland oyster industry. His goal is 100,000 acres (compared to around 8,000 today) of well-managed oyster leases, supporting small and large producers alike.
Hargrove’s checking the growth in an area he’s previously seeded. It doesn’t make much sense that he must do so by scraping the bottom—potentially killing some of his crop—with destructive tools developed hundreds of years ago. If the UMD-led project can drag oyster farming into the 21st century through robotic-enabled aquacul ture, producers like him and Horseman are on board.
The bottom here is far different from the one where Keshav Rajasekaren steered a robot a few weeks earlier. They sort through the contents of dredge— perhaps a dozen live oysters along with empty shells—and then chuck the lot back in.
From a 19th century high of about 15 million bushels, Maryland’s oyster harvest crashed to near zero in the early 2000s, cracking 500,000 this year for the first time since the 1980s.
“If you take everything you use for vision in the air and you move it underwater, it doesn’t work there,” says Yiannis Aloimonos, a profes sor of computer science who specializes in computer vision. “There’s sediment moving around everywhere, the light is different. It’s a mess—and it raises a lot of very interesting questions.”
Until recently, Horseman was focused on a family business restor ing fishing boats—fixing engines, sheathing old wooden hulls with fiberglass. But his grandfather and generations before were watermen, making the business move feel natural. In April 2021, in an act of supreme faith in the future of the industry, his new seafood company incorporated, and today it ships truckloads of oysters, crabs, fish and other catches daily to restaurants and markets in the Baltimore-D.C. region and along the East Coast.
SOURCE:
Aloimonos says his goal is to get the emerging technology into the hands of the watermen who’ve worked the bay for centuries—keeping a traditional trade alive with futuristic technology.
MARYLAND OYSTER HARVESTS IN DECLINE, 1870 TO 2020
But the first step is hardly an easy one.
“We’d be adding another agricultural county to Maryland, but underwater,” he says. “And from there, you could develop an industry that would produce 10 or 15 million bushels a year or higher than ever.”
TRADITIONSOFBUCKETLOADTERP
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A
THE “M BOOK,” WITH ITS 20 DON’T-MISS MARYLAND MILESTONES, IS BACK. JOIN A SUPER-SPIRITED STUDENT ON HER JOURNEY TO COMPLETE THEM ALL.
Inside, amid colorful photos and cartoony illustrations, it presents an unusual kind of homework assignment: Rather than percentages or letter grades, points of pride are up for grabs.
The compilation of 20 items dares Terps to get involved, explore the campus and give back before they graduate, while documenting their feats with selfies or videos. Every five tasks checked off earn them commemorative Alumni Association pins (like the two on this page), and the complete list is good for a special medallion to wear at commencement.
AS NEW TERPS secure their student IDs, coordinate posters with roommates and begin making Maryland their home, a cute little volume might stick out among their hefty stack of textbooks.
So what does it take to reach the pin-nacle (heh, heh) of Maryland spirit? Follow along as Zoe Nicholson ’24, vice president of alumni programming for the Student Alumni Leadership Council (SALC), lets Terp join her on her journey to find out, re-creating her favorite moments along the way.
“Strong traditions of students really breed strong connections as alumni, and I think the Bucket List is a really powerful way to make those connections.”
BUCKETLOAD
BY ANNIE KRAKOWER PHOTOS BY JOHN T. CONSOLI
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This semester, the University of Maryland Alumni Association distributed to first-year students its fifth annual version of the revived “M Book.” From 1916 to 2001, the tidy, if dense book featured registration rules and codes of conduct. There’s the whole internet for that now, so the updated editions take a less formal tack and instead showcase university history, culture, famous alums, handy tips … and the UMD Bucket List.
Amy Eichhorst, associate vice president of alumni and donor relations and executive director of the Alumni Association, says bringing together all the traditions in one spot has been exciting.
one of my first study sessions at the Stamp, sporting my TerrapinSTRONG mask as a reminder of what campus life was like at the time. Don’t we make a good trio?
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groups. I set out to score my first pin from the Alumni Association, and sitting with one of Maryland’s most famous alums (and his Muppet friend) seemed easy enough. I stopped by and snapped a pic after
Without even knowing it, I had already crossed my first item off the Bucket List when I received my “M Book” during orientation, before Fall 2020 move-in. Off to a great start!
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COVID canceled a lot of in-person events during my first semester, but the Bucket List gave me plenty to do, either on my own or in small
✓ GET YOUR M BOOK
✓ SIT AT THE JIM HENSON STATUE
I snagged a free scoop with my friend and fellow SALC member Rowan Mohan ’24 during I <3 UMD Week, a lead-up to Maryland Day, in Spring 2021. I got mint chocolate chip—now my go-to flavor.
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My roommate’s family always hosts a big Homecoming tailgate, so I got to join that last fall. And as a member of Alpha Omicron Pi, I also love mingling with other chapters at the big Greek life bashes near Lot 1 and the soccer field. The tailgates show why people love our school so much, and it’s definitely fun to see red everywhere you go and everyone packed with Maryland pride.
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✓ RUB TESTUDO’S
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Maryland’s annual student org showcase was virtual my freshman year, but that didn’t stop me from finding a great group to join: UMD’s chapter of One Love. The national foundation had formed in response to the murder of University of Virginia lacrosse player Yeardley Love, a victim of intimate partner violence. She and I grew up in the same area, so I knew her story well and had been involved in the organization as a high schooler. It was nice to find something on campus that I had some experience with and be able to continue promoting healthy relationships.
Finding a good time to take the plunge can be difficult—that water gets cold! You gotta have a lot of guts to jump in, or at least some good friends to go with you. Luckily, my buddies from Cumberland Hall joined me for this nighttime dip, and those first five items earned me a pin!
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✓ FIND A CLUB TO JOIN AT THE FIRST LOOK FAIR
✓ EAT MARYLAND DAIRY ICE CREAM
✓ GO TO A FOOTBALL TAILGATE
that McKeldin one and the statue near the Riggs Alumni Center routinely on my running route, so I hit up those the most.
NOSE FOR GOOD LUCK
and trying out yoga, I even took some of my Zoom classes out on the grass.
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TOSTILLDO □ PICK UP YOUR FREE COPY OF THE FIRST YEAR BOOK □ ATTEND THE SHOWHOMECOMINGSEECOMEDY □ BOWL AT TERPZONE □ LEARN THE WORDS TO THE VICTORY SONG □ VOLUNTEER DURING DO GOOD MONTH □ HIT NEIGHBORHOODEVERY AT MARYLAND DAY □ TAKE YOUR GRADUATION PHOTO AT THE “M” ILLUSTRATION BY CHARLENE PROSSER CASTILLO
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Another simple item to check off the list! I started with the statue outside McKeldin Library, but to this day, I rub any Testudo nose that I encounter on campus— especially during finals. I pass
✓ CATCH SOME RAYS ON LA PLATA BEACH
✓ WADE IN THE ODK FOUNTAIN
Having somewhere to safely take my mask off was so nice during
You might not cross paths with President Pines if you only walk to and from class, but getting
✓ MAKE A DONATION ON GIVING DAY
I’ve attended quite a few Riggs events as a member of SALC—which works to connect students, alumni and donors to inspire a sense of community— but that Leadership Conference
ILLUSTRATION BY CHARLENE PROSSER CASTILLO
□✓ SIT ON THE WALL AND WAVE THE MARYLAND FLAG AT A BASKETBALL GAME
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As a marketing intern with Maryland Athletics, I helped with the flag drop at every football game, unrolling it and running it down the stairs next to the student crowd. (Folding it back up so the colors match up correctly definitely takes some strategy!) So I’m very involved with this flag, but I’ve actually only been underneath it at basketball games last season. It’s very fun—the flag is heavier than it looks, but it looks really cool when done properly.
Besides the don’t-miss Bucket List items, the “M Book” also highlights nuggets of UMD knowledge that every Terp should know: Don’t forget how close you are to D.C., La Plata Beach isn’t actually a beach, and of course, never skip an event that distributes free T-shirts.
□✓ SEE A PERFORMANCE AT THE CLARICE OR HOFF THEATER
□✓ GET A TURTLE PIN FROM PRESIDENT PINES
RECENT GRADS: Got any other advice for new students? Let us know at terpfeedback@umd.edu.
IF ONLY THEY’D KNOWN
While I haven’t made it to a show at The Clarice yet (I have been there to study, though!), I did get to see my sorority sister perform with her all-women a cappella group, the Treblemakers, at the Hoff last fall. They’re fantastic, really talented.
□✓ ATTEND AN EVENT AT THE SAMUEL RIGGS IV ALUMNI CENTER
Dinner where I got a pin from Pines is one of the first that stands out. I’ve also planned a couple of events since then, including last spring’s Terps Under 30 program that allowed current students and young alums to network.
Last spring, I gave $20 to Maryland Smith, since I’m in the business school, and another $20 to the Alumni Association Student Engagement Fund, helping ensure Terp traditions—like the “M Book”!—can continue for years to come.
involved on campus helped me check this item off the list three times. The first time, I saw him at Pines on Parade, when the president greeted the campus community during his inauguration week and debuted a new Maryland Dairy ice cream flavor, TerraPines and Pralines. I picked up another pin at a basketball game, where he was adamant that recipients had to be wearing one of the team’s themed T-shirts. The third one came during the Alumni Association Leadership Conference dinner last fall. The mini turtles are all on my backpack—and they go nicely with the second Alumni Association pin I earned for five more Bucket List items completed!
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• Get quoted in The Diamondback
• Make the dean’s list
• Participate in a basketball game flash mob
Whether you just turned your tassel or it’s been decades since you last rubbed Testudo’s nose, membership in the University of Maryland Alumni Association will keep you connected to your alma mater.
The Bucket List has evolved with each new edition of the “M Book,” but Nicholson was on top of it from the start. In addition to the items from the 2022-23 list, she’s also checked off:
BUCKETSBONUS
Get this FREE limited-edition T-shirt when you join by Dec. 31. Visit alumni.umd.edu/Join! to grab one before they’re gone.
Amy Eichhorst Associate Vice President, Alumni and Donor Relations Executive Director, Alumni Association
Letter From the DirectorExecutive Directory to You
Here are a few examples of what the directory holds:
Online Terp “Yellow Pages” Features Alum Businesses
I speak often about the importance of creating and maintain ing connections between the university and its 405,000 alumni. That’s a powerful network for you to tap into to enrich your personal and professional life. With this in mind, we have been expanding our career resources programming to advance your career, elevate your expertise and link to other Terps.
Go Terps!
• Bee America: Christopher White MBA ’07 sells artisanal honey, lotion bars and lip balms, and offers virtual tastings.
POST-GRAD
CAREER COACHING, podcast posting or cheese-tasting hosting: The Alumni Association’s new and growing Terp Referral Exchange Business Directory offers lots of ways to connect with need-it-now and eclectic alumniUsersventures.ofthesearchable online directory can discover and patronize more than 180 Terp-led businesses and continue the tradition of Terps supporting Terps. Terp business owners and leaders, meanwhile, can promote information about their company to fellow alums and the general public. (Want to be added? Subscription details are available at umd.alumniq.com/biz.)
During a busy spring, the Alumni Association and Black Alumni Network in April hosted the inaugural Black Alumni Weekend, a three-day celebration that drew more than 700 Terps. The dozen-plus events included a Gift of Giving Gala, “Terpchella” music festival and Sunday brunch—all of which sold out. A few hundred Terps also enjoyed lively talks and fruitful meetups at the third EnTERPreneur Conference, which featured Kevin Plank ’96, Under Armour’s founder, executive chairman and brand chief of sports apparel.
That’s why I’m so excited to launch Forever Fearless, our new strategic vision for the organization. It lays out our path to engage with all students, help alumni live meaningful and impactful lives, encourage them to serve their communities and world, and foster Terrapin pride. You can find more details later this fall on Forever Fearless, which aligns with the university’s own recently launched strategic plan, at alumni.umd.edu.
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ALUMNI ASSOCIATION
• Carr2 Real Estate: Terps Rachel ’95 and Scott Carr discount commission fees for home sellers and buyers who are also Terps.
• Two Hearts Dance & Yoga: Lee-Ann Barber ’09 provides private lessons, movement classes and community events.
We look to build on these successes with our first Young Alumni Conference taking place in late September and a robust schedule of events during Homecoming Week in October. (See facing page.) I hope to see you there.
JUST AS I rely on Google Maps when traveling anywhere new, your Alumni Association also makes sure it has clear directions to supporting the University of Maryland community.
• BeadLuv: Nerissa Legge ’04 handcrafts one-of-akind beaded jewelry.
and the
Stoking Homecoming Spirit
HOMECOMING TAILGATE OCT 22
See the names of new Alumni Association lifetime members etched into the Frann G. & Eric S. Francis Lifetime Member Wall next to Maryland Stadium.
LIFE WALL UNVEILING OCT 22
NEW TERP ENTREPRENEUR NETWORK EXPO OCT 20
See more
Lace up your sneakers! The association invites Terps and their families to walk, jog or run in College Park—or their own streets!— to raise money for its scholarship fund.
at alumni.umd.edu.
NEW WINE DOWN WEDNESDAY OCT 19
The Alumni Association will ramp up its Homecoming Week lineup this fall to wel come back and celebrate Terps returning to campus from all generations and locations. The events all fuel excitement in the week (Oct. 16-22) leading up to the football show down between the Terps and Northwestern Wildcats. The association will host a mix of in-person and virtual options, so everyone can be a part of the fun. Highlights include:
The association kicks off a program offering Terp-branded wines with a virtual tasting. Shipments will be sent in advance to reg istered participants (ages 21 and over, of course!).
More to Cheer For: An Expanded Events Schedule
43FALL 2022OPPOSITE: ILLUSTRATION VIA ISTOCK; THIS PAGE: PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION
DIAMONDBACK DASH 5K OCT 16-22
The annual beer garden and tailgate in Moxley Gardens will feature Terp-owned companies, along with the Testudo Tykes Zone in the Samuel Riggs IV Alumni Center. Association members get a voucher allowing them to drink and eat for free. details Alumni Association’s full calendar
Student startups will be the stars of this pitch competition featuring notable alum judges. Proceeds will support the Alumni EnTERPreneurship Fund.
Homecoming
Some of Hadadi’s recent favorite TV shows—“Reservation Dogs” and “Bust Down”—dig into life on an Oklahoma reservation and in Gary, Ind., respec tively, a refreshing shift from the New York City- or Los Angeles-centric series that have long been de rigueur
PROFILES
POST-GRAD
A writer at New York Magazine’s Vulture, an influential culture website, Hadadi spends her days looking for storylines she hasn’t seen before, fresh concepts in format and plain old fun. Her sweep extends from the latest block buster Marvel project to tiny independent movies that nobody has heard of—yet.
Other trends irk Hadadi. The flash back setup, in which a series starts at a certain time and place and then jumps backward to show how the characters got there, has worn out its welcome, she says. Like any inquisitive journalist, “I find it very annoying to be told where the story is going to go.”—sl
heorizing about the goings-on in “Severance’s” eerie office building, probing the dysfunction of the filthy-rich Roys on “Succession,” appraising the many Viking hairdos on display in “The Northman”—they’re all part of the pop culture territory that television and film critic Roxana Hadadi ’09 trawls for a living.
44 TERP.UMD.EDU
PHOTO BY STEPHANIE S. CORDLE
Hadadi’s own taste, she says, leans toward “movies about guys being dudes”—Michael Mann’s “Miami Vice” or “Heat,” for example. An Iranian American, she’s also interested in “the different open-mindedness.cinema.byperspectives”globalofferedinternationalButbeingacriticdemands
Roxana Hadadi ’09, television and film critic for Vulture, keeps an (almost entirely) open mind about what’s watching.worth
Critic Thinking
“There’s very rarely anything that I’m like, ‘No, I won’t watch that,’” she says. “Aside from, like, reality TV.”
“It’s nice to be able to have the freedom to swing in both directions,” sheHadadi’ssays. determined path toward the critic’s life got its first big boost at UMD. After growing up in Silver Spring, Md., with a love of “Friends” reruns and classic movies on PBS, she eventually became editor of The Diamondback’s Diversions section, writing regularly about movies, music and TV and gaining confidence in her ability to analyze art.
After graduating from college and earning a master’s degree in American literature from American University, Hadadi began working as associate director of annual giving and special projects at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, a job she kept for eight years while building her freelance career, contributing to outlets like The A.V. Club and Roger Ebert’s eponymous website. After writing for Vulture for about a year, she got a full-time offer last fall. She also makes regular appear ances on NPR’s signature entertainment podcast, “Pop Culture Happy Hour.”
of undergraduate studies in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, who got to know Hadadi largely through his now-wife, who at the time worked at The Diamondback. “It was just a real passion that she had.”
Vulture Writer Makes Sharp Points on Popular Culture
“She was always citing books and talking about TV shows and movies,” says Josh Madden ’05, assistant dean
ROXANA HADADI ’09
T
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WE OWN THIS CITY (HBO AND HBO MAX)
THE BEAR SEASON ONE (HULU)
ABBOTT ELEMENTARY
THE RIGHTEOUS GEMSTONES
THE BEAR
Stream of the Crop
ABBOTT ELEMENTARY SEASON ONE (ABC AND HULU) Quinta aboutworkplaceBrunson’scomedytheteachers and staff at a cutaways.documentary-styleexuberantofelementaryPhiladelphiaschoolishonestabouttheshamefulunderfundingourpublicschools,aboutwhatcanbeachievedthroughteamworkandcamaraderie,andskillfulinitsuseof
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: PHOTOS BY FRANK OCKENFELS/FX; NORRIS/HBO;
FRED
alternatelysentimentality,masculinityDannyMAX)McBridethrivesintheoverlapbetweengrotesqueandgenuineandhislatestseriesaboutafamilyofmegachurchtelevangelistsisjarringlyhilariousandhilariouslyjarring.
SCOTT EVERETT WHITE/ABC
THE RIGHTEOUS GEMSTONES
GASLIT (STARZ)Fiftyyears after Watergate, the minise ries “Gaslit” looks back on the circle of enablers around President Nixon, and shares the shocking true story of how those yes-men authorized the kidnapping and abuse of Martha Mitchell, wife to Nixon attorney general John. Julia Roberts is fantastic as the wronged, and never fully redeemed, Martha.
Overwhelmed by so many new streaming shows? Roxana Hadidi did the work for us and suggests a few recent gems you may have missed:
The work of two University of corruptalumni—journalistMarylandJustinFentonandjournalist-turned-TV-creatorDavidSimon—theminiseriesservesasakindofsequeltoSimon’slegendaryshow“TheWire.”SimongivesFenton’ssame-namedbookaboutBaltimore’sGunTraceTaskForceafaithful,discomfitingadaptation.
Is “The Bear” a comedy, a drama, or both? However you interpret it, this series about an up-and-coming chef returning to his family’s Chicago sandwich shop to take over after his brother dies by suicide is tense, bittersweet and anchored by a strong ensemble.
SEASON TWO (HBO AND HBO
A ofPeriodChange
Anju Bist MBA ’98 (center, in white) has made menstrual products more affordable and accessible to women in India with her banana fiber sanitary pad.
COURTESY OF TEAM SAUKHYAM ANJU BIST MBA ’98
which don’t have adhesive, are worn with wings. Users can clean them by soaking them in cold water for a few minutes, lightly washing with soap and then letting them air-dry. They’ll even stand up to a machine wash, says Bist.
D
In India, where Bist is managing director
After developing the pads around 2015, Saukhyam, which means “happiness and well-being” in Sanskrit, built production centers in rural India and hired local women to work in them. It gave away pads for free to introduce the product, and now sells them at cost around the country. International online orders, which cost roughly $5 for a pack of four, subsidize the lower-cost pads sold in India.Known as “the pad woman of India,” Bist estimates that Saukhyam has sold and distributed more than 500,000 pads, saving some 43,750 tons of non-biodegradable menstrual waste. Earlier this year, the Government of India honored Bist with a “Women Transforming India” award.
Often, girls in small towns skip school on the days they’re bleeding or drop out entirely. Also, the cloth, leaves or even cow dung used in lieu of pads or tampons breed medical issues; 28% of women in India are diagnosed with cervical cancer, which is linked to unhygienic menstruation management.
isposable menstrual products radically changed women’s lives when they were introduced in the late 1800s and early 1900s, replacing the cloth, moss, animal fur and other materials women had relied on for centuries and making menstrual hygiene a cleaner, simpler affair.
Bist and her team turned to an alternative source. India is the world’s largest banana
of the nonprofit Saukhyam Reusable Pads, disposable menstrual products are unattain able for many women and girls in rural areas.
Now, Anju Bist MBA ’98 is hoping to foment the next period revolution in her native India and around the world: the first reusable, sustainable pads made from the fiber of banana trees. They also happen to be affordable and effective.
“Our planet does not have enough resources for us to take, make, use and throw (away), and keep doing that endlessly,” she says. “Disposable sanitary napkins are 90% plastic, so they will become known as the bad idea that they are.”—sl
PHOTO
Another matter: Tampons and pads are a disaster for the planet. One person’s periods can result in up to 15,000 landfilled pads or tampons over their lifetime, and hundreds of pounds of plastic wrap and applicators. The products can take 800 years to decompose and create 200,000 metric tons of waste yearly.After earning an MBA at Maryland, Bist returned to India, where she and colleagues at the NGO Mata Amritanandamayi Math, the parent organization of Saukhyam, eventually began considering what they could do to make safe menstrual products more widely available. Most disposable pads are made with cellulose fiber from tree bark, which necessitates cutting down living trees.
producer, and, unlike an apple tree or mango tree, banana trees bear fruit once and are down–agriculturalcutwastethattheteamrealizedcouldbecomeavaluableproduct.Saukhyam’spads,
46 TERP.UMD.EDU POST-GRAD PROFILES
Alum’s Banana Fiber Menstrual Pads Offer Accessible Solution to Girls and Women in India
CLASS NOTES
BRIONNA JONES ’16 and ALYSSA THOMAS ’14 of the Connecticut Sun were selected to compete in July’s WNBA All-Star Game, their second and third appearances, respectively.
Submit your class notes and read many more at terp.umd.edu.
—SL
Blue Ambition
PHOTO BY STEPHANIE
JESSICA ENNIS ENBA ’20 is the new public engagement director in the White House Council on Environmental Quality. She spent 14 years at the nonprofit Earthjustice, most recently as its legislative director for climate and energy.
ERIC C. BICKEL ’92, M.ED. ’96 co-wrote the book “Still Barking: Friendship, Brotherhood, and 25 Years of The Sports Junkies” with his three co-hosts from “The Sports Junkies,” sharing the stories behind Washington, D.C.’s longest-running sports talk show.
THAT VIBRANT SHADE of blue in your bag of M&Ms comes from an unlikely source: red cabbage, by way of a Terp. Rebecca Robbins Ph.D. ’95, a food chemist focusing on color at Mars Wrigley, made a groundbreaking discovery last year when she used a natural pigment called anthocyanin from the homely vegetable to create an alter native to the synthetic dye for cyan blue that had long been the industry standard.Thisconfluence of visual aesthetics, food and science is natural
NASA named DIANA TRUJILLO ’07 one of seven new flight directors to oversee human space flight operations. She most recently served as a supervisor at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, supporting exploration missions on Mars and before that was a mission lead for the Mars Perseverance rover.
Sure, she likes sweets, but it was the science of color that drew her.
Food Chemist Perks Up Palette of M&Ms, Other Candies
“Color comes from moving electrons in organic molecules—yes, it sounds geeky, but it is true,” she says. “When people think of art, they think of a painting or a drawing, but there is art in discovery, there is art in telling a story about science, and there is art in inquiry.”
S. CORDLE; ILLUSTRATIONS BY KOLIN BEHRENS
for Robbins, whose family specialized in all three: “My mother was an artist, my father was a doctor, and I lived in France with my grandparents, who were farmers,” she says.
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After discovering her natural ability for chemistry in high school, Robbins went on to earn a doctorate in organic chemistry from UMD and pursued a postdoc at Tulane, then joined the faculty at Vassar College, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a research scientist. She’s been with Mars Wrigley since 2004, rising to the role of color chemistry manager.
JOE FELDMANN ’04 competed on the TV series “Jeopardy!” for three nights in June, winning $45,000. A director at Capital One Bank, he told host Mayim Bialik that he attended Maryland concurrently with his brother, Cary Feldmann ’05, and mother, Carol Mason M.A. ’90, MLS ’03.
A
48 TERP.UMD.EDU FROM THE ARCHIVES ADELE STAMP PHOTO COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES
On Centennial of UMD Hiring
“(Y)ou, as Dean of Women, are respon sible to me for the conditions among the girl students,” Woods wrote, “and I shall look to you for reports of misbehavior along the lines mentioned.”Those“girl students” numbered barely 100 when Stamp arrived; they began enrolling only six years earlier. By the time she retired in 1960, the group had grown under her guidance to more than 4,000.—ak
In a letter sent during Stamp’s first year in the new leadership role, then-university Presi dent Albert F. Woods outlined six principles for her to enforce, including ensuring female students refrained from coarse language, kept their rooms presentable and signed out each time they left their residence halls.
“Coarseness”toRequestStampOutand“Misbehavior”
ne hundred years ago, Adele H. Stamp set to work as the University of Maryland’s first dean of women. She spent nearly four decades promoting female students’ accomplishments, organizing their clubs and activities, and serving as a role model as the institution’s highest-ranking woman.
Also on the list of responsibilities for the student union’s namesake: making sure female Terps behaved in a “proper and desir able” manner.
O
First Dean of Women, Peek at President’s Letter to Her
It’s all happening now at the University of Maryland. Here, we lead Fearlessly Forward.
AND THE TEXTBOOKS MIGHT BE SCUBA TANKS, A SHEEP’S PEN STAGE LIGHTS OR A PRESS PASS. At the University of Maryland, learning lives inside our classrooms and far beyond. Design NASA robots in a neutral buoyancy tank. Help birth a lamb on the Campus Farm. Tutor refugee children in local schools. Or cover a media briefing in the nation’s capital, just 4 miles away.
20742–8724
IT'S ALL HAPPENING IN COLLEGE PARK. JOIN US. MD
ALL’S RIGHT AT HOME
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COME BACK TO MARYLAND TO CELEBRATE TERP SPIRIT AND FEEL ALL THE FEELS. See long-lost friends and meet new ones. Laugh out loud at the Comedy Show. Belt out the Maryland Victory Song. Discover the latest research happening beyond the field. Watch fireworks burst over McKeldin. Snap a selfie with Testudo at the big game.
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