Spring 2023

AN END TO THE BLEEDING

SPRING 2023 / CONNECTING THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND COMMUNITY

FEATURES ONLINE

BY SALA LEVIN ’10

24 Deconstructing Maryland’s Open House

As UMD celebrates 25 years of Maryland Day,

BY ANNIE KRAKOWER

“Quite a Ride”

Started by Black Student Union members using their own cars to offer safe rides at night, Shuttle-UM marks its 50th anniversary. —

Terp Trendsetters

We found five UMD groups and traditions that spread to campuses nationwide—including some cheeky shenanigans.

BY KAREN SHIH ’09

“The Last of Us” Goes Under the Microscope

A faculty fungi expert finds TV series’ mushroom apocalypse is far from a complete fantasy.

30 D.C. History by the Forkful An anthropology alum’s food tour dishes out tales from “Black Broadway” and a taste of immigrant culinary traditions.

18 An End to the Bleeding

The mayor of Knoxville, Tenn., picked up a UMD researcher’s book on preventing gun violence. The resulting partnership could be a model for how cities can create safer streets.

we tell Terps’ behindthe-scenes stories.

one of my favorite Maryland Day memories was in 2012, when my older son worked alongside me in our unit’s booth and yelled “STEP RIGHT UP!” to passersby like a pint-size carnival barker.

There was the year a preteen buddy pitched in with me and Henry and began cheerfully feeding spoonfuls of Maryland Dairy ice cream samples directly into guests’ mouths until I quickly halted that. In 2022, the younger one—who first attended this event by stroller—handed out Testudo bobbleheads before taking a campus tour.

Peter and I stood on the top floor of the gleaming, not-yet-open Johnson-Whittle Hall and looked down on the Terps’ baseball game below, and the lively scene beyond. There, on that sunny spring afternoon, he was 100% sold on being a Terp. We’re so happy that this fall, he will be.

While COVID spoiled my streak of volunteering at every Maryland Day since 2009, I wore my new 15-year anniversary pin on April 29 anyway. The 2023 event itself marked 25 years of “celebrating our world,” as the motto went, and my little milestone got me thinking about how I’ve watched my kids grow up there.

I hope you too have happy memories of attending Maryland Day, whether reminiscing about your student days, introducing the campus to your friends and family, or returning year after year with your own kids to pet the tarantulas, cheer at the spring football game or fish for toy turtles in the ODK Fountain. We marked the 25th anniversary here in Terp by collecting fun facts, backstories and stats on the university’s biggest one-day event.

In this issue’s cover story, we trace new UMD researcher Thomas Abt’s pioneering work on preventing gun violence, from theory to the streets of Knoxville, Tenn. Writer Sala Levin and photographer John Consoli traveled to the city, struggling like so many others nationwide to end this plague, to meet those suffering its effects and the city leaders, police and local activists committed to stopping it.

You’ll also find on the following pages other examples of the university tackling the toughest problems facing our communities and world, starting with its one-of-a-kind $30 million investment in Grand Challenges Grants earlier this year for 50 projects from researchers across campus.

In late-breaking news, we squeaked into this issue the announcement on Maryland Day of a major expansion of the university’s Do Good endeavors, aimed at empowering Terps and others to tackle even more grand challenges. Take a peek, and you’ll feel proud of how UMD is committed to making a difference, everywhere.

Publisher BRIAN ULLMANN ’92

Vice President, Marketing and Communications Adviser

MARGARET HALL

Executive Director, Creative Strategies

Magazine Staff

LAUREN BROWN

University Editor

JOHN T. CONSOLI ’86

Creative Director

VALERIE MORGAN

Art Director

CHRIS CARROLL MAGGIE HASLAM

ANNIE KRAKOWER

SALA LEVIN ’10

KAREN SHIH ’09

Writers

KOLIN BEHRENS

CHARLENE PROSSER CASTILLO

Designers

STEPHANIE S. CORDLE

Photographer

GAIL RUPERT M.L.S. ’10 Photography Archivist

HONG H. HUYNH

Photography Assistant

JAGU CORNISH

Production Manager

DYLAN MANFRE

M.JOUR. ’23

Graduate Assistant

EMAIL terpfeedback@umd.edu

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FACEBOOK.COM / UnivofMaryland TWITTER.COM /UofMaryland INSTAGRAM.COM / univofmaryland YOUTUBE.COM /UMD2101

The University of Maryland, College Park is an equal opportunity institution with respect to both education and employment. University policies, programs and activities are in conformance with pertinent federal and state laws and regulations on nondiscrimination regarding race, color, religion, age, national origin, political affiliation, gender, sexual orientation or disability.

COVER

“Neverending,” by art major Mary Mena ’24, photographed by John T. Consoli. Mena’s artwork represents the 321 people shot each day in the United States; it won first prize in the sculpture category of the 2023 Sadat Art for Justice and Peace Competition, a UMD event co-sponsored by the Sadat Chair for Peace and Development and the Department of Art and directed by Professor Shibley Telhami. See more examples of students’ winning pieces at sadat.umd.edu/events/sadat-art-justice-and-peace-competition.

Lauren Brown University Editor

Traditions by the Bucketload

On page 5 of your Winter 2023 issue, I noted a remark in a letter about an article on the M Book. As a sophomore at UMD, I illustrated the M Book along with my sorority sister, Arlene Hoffman. She provided cartoon-like drawings, but mine were more serious. I do recall particular drawings featuring the marching band and color guard and several wrestlers. (As a member of that same color guard, we were featured on the front page of The Washington Post back in the day.)

—KRISTEN-STREUBING-BEAZLEY ’61, ’75, BOSTON

Coal Veins

Please give my appreciation and compliments to writer Liam Farrell and anthropology Professor Paul Shackel for the article and research described in it. As a native of northeastern Pennsylvania (Scranton), I can attest to the lives of those who worked in the mines and on the railroads. The article brought back memories from stories conveyed to me by both grandfathers, who worked for the Erie Lackawanna Railroad.

—PETER

Beer, Off the Beaten Track

Great to hear about this Terpowned brewery. I drank the Alaska Amber while on a cruise in 2006. As a homebrewer and proud Terp alumnus, I always love to hear about great alumni beer success stories. Would love

to see the beer distributed out here in New Jersey. Cheers!

—RICHARD COHEN ’87, LIVINGSTON, N.J.

This is cool! Love that they’re embracing sustainability and conservation along with brewing. I’ll definitely look for their beers locally. Go Terps!

—SANJAY SHANTARAM, OAKTON, VA.

“All the News That Fits”

I am delighted by Terp’s colorful artwork, well-written articles and upbeat attitude. Our sleek university of today is a far cry from my own primitive days of the 1940s. Back then, we staff members of undergraduate publications sweated away in wooden, army-style barracks, one of several hastily built to accommodate masses of veterans on the G.I. Bill. Underneath the splintery wooden floor could be found a secret earthen crawlspace, perfect for romantic trysts. (Or so I’m told.) On the wall of The Diamondback office hung a handprinted variation of The New York Times slogan, “All the news that’s fit to print.” Our sign read, “All the news that fits.”

—MOLLEE KRUGER ’50, ROCKVILLE, MD.

WRITE TO US

We love to hear from readers. Send your feedback, insights, compliments—and, yes, complaints—to terpfeedback@umd.edu or to:

Terp magazine

Office of Marketing and Communications 7736 Baltimore Ave. College Park, MD 20742

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.

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.

Ever since I was in elementary school, being a Terp was my dream. The Maryland Promise scholarship was a burden lifted off of everybody.

I felt I would be truly supported in my higher education journey.  I hope to inspire more people who look like me and with similar backgrounds to pursue STEM careers.

—MARYLAND PROMISE PROGRAM SCHOLARSHIP RECIPIENTS

M. MECCA, HERNDON, VA.

School of Public Policy Building Named for Thurgood Marshall

Future Supreme Court Justice Helped Desegregate UMD

The university of Maryland named its new School of Public Policy building for the late civil rights lawyer and former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, recognizing his role in breaking down barriers for African American students, including the desegregation of the University of Maryland.

“Today marks another historic step in our efforts at the University of Maryland to create a multicultural, inclusive community that gives everyone a chance to succeed,” UMD President Darryll J. Pines said at a February celebration.

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore told the audience—which included Thurgood Marshall, Jr., the justice’s son—that the naming of Thurgood Marshall Hall is an obligation to uphold his legacy.

“It means every single day as the work is being done here, it must be done with a full focus on the way that Justice Marshall lived his life,” he said. “And that was without boundaries.”

Opened in Fall 2022, the state-of-the-art building, with its multifunctional and high-tech spaces, supports the school’s mission to advance the public good by drawing together students, faculty and other experts to foster world-changing policy discourse and action.

“Thurgood Marshall was an exemplary policy shaper, policymaker, analytical thinker, powerful advocate, defender of democracy, guardian of civil and human rights, and inspiring leader,” said Dean Robert C. Orr. “He embodied everything our School of Public Policy aspires to, and stands for.”

Born in Baltimore, Marshall was barred

from applying to the University of Maryland School of Law in Baltimore in 1930 because he was Black. Soon after his graduation from Howard University Law School, where he was first in his class, Marshall joined the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. He sued the University of Maryland on behalf of another Black student seeking admission to the law school and was part of the team that launched successful legal battles against the university on behalf of Parren Mitchell and Hiram Whittle, who were denied admission. In 1950, Mitchell became the first Black student to take graduate classes on the College Park campus, and a year later, Whittle enrolled as the university’s first Black undergraduate student.

Marshall went on to argue the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which declared segregation unconstitutional. He was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1967 and held the role of associate justice for 24 years.

“This recognition serves as a testament to his legacy as an unapologetic trailblazer for justice and equality,” the Marshall family said in a statement. “The inspiring work the school does every day to create the next generation of students embodies what was at his core—ensuring a more just and equitable world for all.”

The naming of Thurgood Marshall Hall builds on one of

the initiatives Pines announced on his first day in office: the namings of Yahentamitsi dining hall to honor the Indigenous people of Maryland and of Jones-Hill House and the Pyon-Chen and Johnson-Whittle residence halls, recognizing trailblazers from underrepresented communities.

PHOTO BY JOHN T. CONSOLI

“This recognition serves as a testament to his legacy as an unapologetic trailblazer for justice and equality.”

—THURGOOD MARSHALL FAMILY

UMD Poised to Do More Good

New Opportunities Announced; Campus Icon Unveiled

THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND will dramatically expand its endeavors as the nation’s first Do Good campus, enhancing opportunities for students, nonprofit leaders and social innovators

to make a difference in their communities and around the world.

This growth, announced on Maryland Day with the unveiling of a new campus icon (below), includes new Do Good courses, funding for faculty and staff positions, and support for students with ideas to create a social impact. It will also enable research in philanthropy and nonprofit management, and training for others to succeed in those fields.

“Our students step onto campus wanting to make an impact from day one,” said Robert C. Orr, dean of the School of Public Policy, which houses UMD’s Do Good Institute. “The programs and hands-on learning experiences of this next expanded era of the Do Good campus will provide opportunities for all students to develop the skills and expertise they need to go out and change the world.”

The Do Good Institute, the hub of “Do Good” activities, engages students in courses, internships, mentoring and its marquee Do Good Challenge. Student-founded Do Good initiatives have tackled a wide range of societal problems: The Food Recovery Network, which combats waste by donating unserved food from dining halls, sports venues and group meetings, has spread to 190 college campuses. The James Hollister Wellness Foundation collects and distributes unexpired medication, and has supplied more than $8 million worth of recycled medicine to Ukrainians.

Some of Do Good’s greatest achievements will be displayed on interactive screens in Thurgood Marshall Hall, home of the School of Public Policy. Do Good Plaza, outside the building, features a new, 8-foot-tall sculpture of the words “Do Good,” illuminated with more than 300 LED modules that can create thousands of colors.—SL

“Wimpy Kid” Statue Debuts in Stamp

SCRAWNY, INSECURE Greg Heffley is obsessed with becoming popular. Now, at the Adele H. Stamp Student Union, he certainly will be.

The imperfect protagonist of the long-running “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” series of books by Jeff Kinney ’93 is now immortalized as a statue in the Stamp’s ground floor north atrium, near TerpZone. The artwork, sure to attract kid-lit pilgrims and selfie-seekers, was unveiled on Maryland Day, with Kinney on hand to sign books and meet fans.

Greg’s not exactly a big man on campus, though: The bronze sculpture, by artist Allyson Vought, stands 4 feet tall and matches another portraying the hunched-over hero at Kinney’s Plainview, Mass., bookstore, An Unlikely Story.

Kinney gave the statue as a gift to his alma mater. Last year, he delivered the commencement address to graduates, saying, “If you want the kind of success I’ve had, all you need to do is come up with one good idea, then just repeat it over and over and over again.”—SL

Kian Denison, 11, of Churchville, Md., poses with the Greg Heffley statue.

A “Declaration of Unity” in New Space

National Pan-Hellenic Council, Multicultural Greek Council Celebrate Agora’s Opening

The dozens of students and alums who assembled on Fraternity Row on a brisk February morning, proudly sporting the colors of historically African American and other multicultural fraternities and sororities, exemplified the spirit of the neighborhood’s latest addition: the Agora.

The former fraternity house, whose name roughly translates to “gathering place” in ancient Greek, was formally dedicated as a nonresidential facility for them—members of the National Pan-Hellenic Council (NPHC) and Multicultural Greek Council (MGC).

“Across the nation and in higher education, we are still working to repair and reconstruct systems that historically left out some of our friends, family and peers,” university President Darryll J. Pines said at the event. “I’m proud that with the Agora, we are establishing a space for communities of color on Fraternity and Sorority Row and further embedding the strength and vibrancy of our diversity into the fabric of our campus.”

When UMD built houses on Fraternity Row in the 1950s and ’60s, Baltimore Avenue acted as a “literal divide” between historically white fraternities and sororities on one side, and cultural interest organizations on the other, says Matt Supple, director of Fraternity and Sorority Life. Racism and discriminatory membership practices exacerbated that divide.

“(NPHC and MGC organizations) formed to facilitate meaningful cultural interactions for students and graduates from marginalized commu-

nities, especially at predominantly white institutions like Maryland,” Vice President for Student Affairs Patty Perillo said at the event. “Yet they never had an exclusive space.”

Today, UMD has 52 Greek-letter organizations, including 13 in the MGC and seven in the NPHC. Members worked with staff as planning for the Agora took shape, asking for a place where they would not reside, but collaborate.

“The camaraderie and the bonding—when we have that strong bond, that’s what allows us to do great things for the community,” says Brian Ndofor ’23, NPHC president.

The university invested over $1 million to renovate the space, and a $97,400 grant from the Student Government Association went toward furniture and other décor. Available for use since the fall, the building includes meeting and study rooms, dining areas and a community room.

NPHC and MGC members look forward to seeing the Agora evolve, including adding lockers for storage, mirrors for step and stroll dance rehearsals, and homey touches.

“This has made all the difference,” says MGC President Briana Mercado ’23 (below, at podium). “Space can sometimes be a barrier. Most times as people of color, we are told to take less of it. The Agora is a declaration of unity.”—ak

Briana Mercado ’23, president of the Multicultural Greek Council, speaks at the dedication ceremony for the Agora in February, saying the new gathering space “has made all the difference” for multicultural fraternities and sororities.

A Wonder-foal Surprise

THE FUZZY NEW filly on the Campus Farm earned its name, Out of the Blue. Unbeknownst to anyone, the farm’s lesson horse, Noble, was pregnant when she came to campus. She delivered a foal in December— and a surprise to students who discovered the addition the next morning. Terps from the Spring 2022 equine reproductive management class made sure the pair was healthy, and a LaunchUMD campaign surpassed its $4,000 fundraising goal to cover the unexpected costs.—AK

Moving to a Culture of Reuse

Store Offers Free, Gently Used Res Hall Requisites

TERPS MOVING INTO their first off-campus apartment don’t need to detour to the dump.

Sure, it might be lights out for the multicolored floor lamp, or lowered expectations for plastic bed risers. But new Maryland students settling into residence halls might delight in that décor.

The Department of Resident Life is supporting those students while rehoming items and keeping them out of landfills at its Terp to Terp Campus ReUse Store. The donation center in Harford Hall collects small appliances, room accessories, kitchen items and

school supplies to pass on to other UMD students for free.

Sustainability intern Shannon Garrett ’24 appreciates “the meaningful conversations with thankful students, the excited smile of a staff member donating something from their home” and seeing thousands of pounds of items being repurposed.

She’s among the student managers and volunteers who run the store, supervised by Lisa Alexander, Res Life’s coordinator of sustainability programs. It opened in May 2021 and recently started accepting clothing, which is distributed not only on campus but also to local women’s shelters and K-12 students.

“It’s great for everybody, not just folks with financial insecurity. We’re creating a culture of reuse,” says Alexander.—KS

To donate or learn more, visit reslife.umd.edu/terptoterp

DORM-READY DONATING

• 340 visits

• 6,549 pounds of distributed items*

Most popular items:

• Kitchen essentials

• Lamps

• Mirrors

• Storage solutions

*May 2021-March 2023

A Mental Health U-Turn

New Course Teaches

Coping Skills to StressedOut Students

Even the most easygoing college student can carry an overstuffed backpack of stressors: challenging classes, increased self-reliance and responsibility, and the ever-looming prospect of finding a job or getting into graduate school.

A one-of-a-kind new class, “U SAD?: Coping with Stress, Anxiety and

Depression,” is training Terps to manage their mental health—and, hopefully, use their skills to help others in need.

“We created this from scratch, based off our collective clinical experiences as therapists, knowing the common issues that college students face and knowing what’s necessary to address it,” says Amy Morgan, assistant professor of couple and family therapy in the School of Public Health’s Department of Family Science. Studies have confirmed that college students are experiencing severe levels of mental health issues; a national survey found that more than 60% of undergraduates met the criteria for at least one mental health problem in the 2020-21 school year.

The seven-week, one-credit course, funded through a university Teaching and Learning Innovation Grant, was

offered twice during the Spring 2023 semester. Each section quickly reached its 30-person capacity, with more students registering for the waitlist. The students came from a range of majors—computer science, economics, aerospace engineering and journalism among them.

“There have definitely been a lot of chances for unique (instances) of vulnerability and people sharing their lives,” says Nicole Gerber M.S. ’24, a graduate assistant for the course.

Topics include people’s personal methods for coping with pressure and stressors that students have faced during college.

“This is not a textbook or lecture class at all; it’s a skills group and a class met in the middle,” says Morgan. Students learn skills like active listening, using meditation and mindfulness to lessen stress, and determining between healthy coping skills like painting or walking and unhealthy ones, like substance use or excessive Netflixing.

One mindful habit Dulce Ortiz ’26 picked up is journaling. “For me, it’s difficult to open up to a person about how I feel. It’s not in my nature,” she says. “I’ve been journaling, and I write my emotions and experiences of the day in a cute little journal. It’s been helping me a lot.”

Ortiz initially thought the emotional nature of the course was “maybe not my thing,” the criminology and criminal justice major says. But she appreciated exchanging tips on what worked to help someone through a dark time, or hearing how a classmate had handled a situation Ortiz herself had been in too.

Morgan says the popularity of the course speaks to its necessity—as do the inquiries from media outlets and other universities she’s received about it.

“That is my intention: to think about how to make this framework accessible so it’s not just offered here at the university.”—sl

Live From New York, It’s a Terp!

Choral Director and Singers Back Up Coldplay

on “SNL”

IF YOU’RE A NIGHT OWL who loves sketch comedy, you might have spotted a Terp in an unexpected place in February: backing up Coldplay on “Saturday Night Live.”

Director of Choral Activities and Associate Professor Jason Max Ferdinand D.M.A. ’15 (above, far right) and his choir, the Jason Max Ferdinand Singers, sang along with lead singer Chris Martin during “The Astronaut” and “Human Heart/Fix You.”

Singer Jacob Collier, a longtime friend of Ferdinand who had previously worked with Coldplay, was the link connecting the British rock band to the Terp.

“It was pretty surreal when Jacob mentioned it, but it became real when Chris himself called me and said, ‘We need 24 singers,’” Ferdinand says.

He turned to his group of 36 singers to see who could make the performance on two weeks’ notice. The ensemble performs in styles ranging from the baroque to contemporary, and members include full-time musicians and music educators, undergraduate and graduate students, even a law student and a police officer.

The group got the musical scores on Wednesday and arrived in New York City late on Thursday. They immediately started rehearsing, polishing their vocals and blocking the performances.

Ferdinand said the show’s production backstage was “organized chaos” and being a part of it all was “incredible.”

“All the performers quickly gained this mutual respect for one another, and we totally admire what Coldplay does,” he says.—SL

Watch the performance at go.umd.edu/SNLTerp

Tiny Turtles, Big Lessons

Hatchlings Bring Science, Math and History to Life

UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND students are accustomed to seeing larger-than-life Testudos, whether bronze statues or furry mascots. This school year, a few Terrapins got a chance to hold real terrapins—small enough to fit in the palm of their hands.

The College of Education raised hatchlings Turbo, Finn and Squirt, as part of the Terrapin Education Research Partnership (TERP), a program that gives teachers across the state opportunities to incorporate turtles

into classroom instruction to improve environmental literacy.

“They’re so engaging, and they’re a really powerful tool for learning, as well as an inspiration,” says Amy Green, director of the Center for Science and Technology in Education, who co-raised the tiny terps with Assistant Clinical Professor Angela Stoltz.

Students collected measurement and weight data for TERP researchers throughout the year. They learned about behavioral adaptations and climate impacts using the turtles in science and math courses, and explored their historical role in local Indigenous cultures.

This summer, the terrapins— now larger and less vulnerable to predators—will return to their birthplace in the Chesapeake Bay.—KS

TOP PHOTO BY WILL HEATH / NBC; RIGHT PHOTO BY STEPHANIE S. CORDLE

Terps With Bushy Tails With Popular Instagram Account, Students Keep an Eye on the Squirrels

IF THERE’S ANYTHING more popular than a Dining Services chicken tendie, it must be a campus squirrel snacking on one.

The Instagram account @UMD_Squirrels_, founded five years ago by animal photography enthusiast Spencer Lin ’21 and passed down to younger students since then, now has over 4,500 followers. It celebrates the antics of the bushy-tailed critters: perching on an e-scooter, dumpster diving, chasing each other or simply trying to hide in plain sight.

Claire Nelson ’23, an early childhood special education major and friend of Lin’s, was the most recent administrator of the account, choosing from Terps’ photo submissions. She says she was always backlogged with requests from students who wanted their images featured on the page.

“There’s a sense of community over something that doesn’t seem like it has much meaning,” Nelson says. —DM

Muscling Up Global Support

Worldwide Terps Group Provides Guidance, Community for International Student-Athletes

One of the biggest leaps long jumper Ashley Germain ’23 had to make when she arrived at the University of Maryland from her home in Montreal was clearing the bureaucracy to get a Social Security card.

For golfer Karla Elena Vázquez Setzer ’24, it was the little things—the early timing of meals, the different food—that amplified her culture shock after moving from Tabasco, Mexico.

To navigate the challenges and rewards of living, studying and competing in a new country, they got involved with Worldwide Terps, a group within Maryland Athletics that supports dozens of international studentathletes.

“It’s very valuable knowing that there is a community out there of people that are just like you, in the same spot, where family is very far away, where there is cultural sensitivity and empathy,” says Vázquez Setzer, now vice president of Worldwide Terps.

Founded in 2018 by Italian women’s golfer Ludovica Farina ’20, the program—which includes Terps from countries such as Costa Rica, Jamaica, the Netherlands and beyond—has evolved to include practical guidance and community-building events. On the logistics side, the

PHOTO BY MACKENZIE MILES / MARYLAND

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: @GRACEQUYNNIE; @MAX_CHIU; @O.ADAMS.O; @LSSADOOZEY

group created a workbook that lays out the steps to get a Social Security number, Maryland driver’s license and other documents, and it worked with International Students and Scholar Services at career meetups to explore on-campus employment options. This year, Worldwide Terps also partnered with TerpTax, a nonprofit that provides free tax preparation services.

Group events foster a sense of belonging, including welcome parties to kick off the academic year and 2022’s inaugural Thanksgiving dinner, featuring traditional American and international cuisines.

“Internationals, they usually don’t have time to go back home (during the U.S. holiday). … You’re on campus by yourself because everyone’s with their family, so it can be a little rough,” says Germain, the group’s president.

“Worldwide Terps is like our second family.”

As it grows to include the more than 50 international student-athletes at UMD, members rely on the input of Maryland Made, Maryland Athletics’ student-athlete development unit, which works to empower Terps to become leaders on and off the playing field.

“We’re making sure international student-athletes feel like this is home,” says Nate McGill, program director for student-athlete development. “That’s what our mission is: to make sure all of our students have a great holistic experience.”–ak

Women’s Basketball Achieves Elite Season

In its 30th NCAA Tournament appearance and 18th under head coach Brenda Frese, the Maryland women’s basketball team advanced to its first Elite Eight since 2015.

The second-seeded Terps handled 15th-seeded Holy Cross and seventhseeded Arizona at the Xfinity Center in the first two rounds, then defeated third-seeded Notre Dame in Greenville, S.C., in the Sweet 16.

That set up a matchup vs. the 2022 champion, South Carolina. Despite 24 points from All-American guard Diamond Miller, the Terps fell to the Gamecocks, 86-75.

“(I’m) just incredibly proud of this team and for leaving it out there for the 40 minutes,” Frese said.

The men’s team, in its first year under coach Kevin Willard, reached the second round of the NCAA Tournament as an eighth seed, edging No. 9-seed West Virginia before falling to top seed Alabama.

Softball Pitcher Spins Perfect Game

Amid the Maryland softball team’s best-ever start, senior Trinity Schlotterbeck added a “pitcher-perfect” moment.

The right-hander tossed the Terps’ first perfect game since 2013 and seventh overall, retiring all 15 batters she faced in a 10-0 mercyrule win over Texas A&M Commerce on Feb. 24.

“I don’t think I really got into my head until the last batter was up,” she said. “I was like, ‘Okay, this is a big moment right here.’”

She struck out eight during the historic start, which was also the program’s 38th no-hitter and first since 2016.

Gymnastics Vaults to New Heights at NCAA Regional

The Maryland gymnastics team ended its 2023 season on a high note, posting a 196.675 for its highest score at an NCAA Regional, a fourth-place finish in Pittsburgh.

The Terps set regional records on bars (49.275) and floor (49.493); senior Aleka Tsiknias and sophomore Sierra Kondo each earned a team-best 9.875 on the uneven bars, and senior Emma Silberman led the squad with a 9.9 on the floor exercise.

“What we’ve accomplished this season is incredible,” head coach Brett Nelligan told The Diamondback. “I think this is yet another building block, and this will set us up for the future.”

SPORTS BRIEFS

PHOTOS: TOP RIGHT BY MACKENZIE MILES / MARYLAND ATHLETICS; BELOW BY ERIN TUDRYN / MARYLAND ATHLETICS

$30M in Grand Challenges Grants Awarded

Unprecedented UMD Research Program Targets Climate, Racial Justice, Energy and More

SURGING TEMPERATURES AND rising seas. Droughts, famines and poverty. Intractable social inequities.

The world’s toughest problems can prompt despair—or spur people and institutions to redefine themselves, strive for solutions and rise to the grand challenges of our time.

That outlook of hope, girded by a belief in the power of science and scholarship, is behind an unprecedented $30 million investment the University of Maryland made earlier this year in 50 research projects spanning every college and school and a host of disciplines.

The university’s Grand Challenges Grants program is led by three projects that will each receive $3 million Institutional Grants over three years to increase literacy, explore the nexus of food, water and energy systems, and protect Marylanders from the effects of climate change.

“Since day one of my presidency, I have charged our campus to tackle the grand challenges of our time by taking advantage of the brilliant work being done by our faculty and researchers across disciplines,” says UMD President Darryll J. Pines.

In addition, six Impact Award winners—other finalists in the institutional category—were each awarded up to $500,000 over two years; and 16 Team Project Grants and 25 Individual Project Grants winners will receive three-year totals of $1.5 million and $150,000, respectively.

The UMD faculty energetically answered the call for proposals; about 135 poured in from across campus, says Vice President for Research Gregory F. Ball.

“In total, they cover a kaleidoscopic array of pressing topics and societal priorities, and we can’t wait to see what our world-class researchers accomplish in the months and years ahead,” he says.

The full list of funded projects spans subjects as diverse as preparing for future pandemics,

fighting racism, developing human-centered artificial intelligence, better understanding the processes of our body’s microbial communities and strengthening democracy.

Institutional Grants in particular, which require cross-disciplinary, multi-institutional work, have the potential to spark profound changes, says Senior Vice President and Provost Jennifer King Rice.

“This collaborative approach allows us to realize novel insights and never-before-explored connections, which supports our overarching goal of creating meaningful solutions that advance the public good for our state and around the globe,” she says.

The researchers leading the Institutional Grants explain the soaring ambitions of their projects:

ADDRESSING CLIMATE CHANGE FOR A SUSTAINABLE EARTH

Led by Ellen Williams, Distinguished University Professor of physics and director of the Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center, the initiative brings together leaders from departments around campus focused on Earth system science. This discipline encompasses all the connections of climate change—from how the oceans store carbon to atmospheric reactions near the boundary of outer space to human impacts on ecosystems. The project

is designed as a step toward creating a new school for translating Earth science and climate science research into action for the region, nation and world.

“We want to build a transdisciplinary collaborative bigger than the sum of its parts so we can most effectively address challenges posed by climate change—starting in the state of Maryland,” including helping farmers with climate-related crop management and warning of extreme weather, says Professor Tatiana Loboda, chair of the Department of Geographical Sciences.

GLOBAL

FEWTURE ALLIANCE: FOOD-ENERGY-

WATER SOLUTIONS FOR A CHANGING CLIMATE

Worldwide, 1.3 billion people are food-insecure, 770 million lack adequate access to energy sources, and 2 billion lack access to safe drinking water. Climate change magnifies these challenges, and communities of color often bear the heaviest burdens. The Global FEWture Alliance, led by Amy Sapkota—MPower Professor of environmental health in the School of Public Health, and director of the CONSERVE Center of Excellence—acknowledges that our vital resources are inextricably linked.

“Instead of addressing food, energy or water challenges individually, we must work across disciplines to develop holistic technology-based and policy solutions that focus on all three areas,” working with partners in Israel, Nepal and Tanzania on experiential learning and capacitybuilding, Sapkota says.

MARYLAND INITIATIVE FOR LITERACY AND EQUITY (MILE)

The COVID-19 pandemic produced the greatest decrease in literacy scores in more than 30 years. But for adults and children living in marginalized communities, “access to literacy achievement is not something that was ‘lost’—full literacy has always come with barriers,” says Donald “DJ” Bolger, associate professor of human development and quantitative methodology, and leader of the initiative.

The project aims to close opportunity gaps that have contributed to longstanding societal inequities. A bedrock goal is to better connect literacy research to U.S. teacher preparation and professional development, sharing evidencebased practices with schools, communities and policymakers. Team members also intend to change how literacy studies are done to reap more relevant knowledge about those—multilingual learners, underserved communities of color—who stand to benefit the most from the research, he says.—CC

Read about all the Grand Challenges Grants awardees at research.umd.edu/gc

Maryland, Start Your Engines Survey

Shows Cars Fuel

Post-COVID Commute

WHILE NEARLY TWO-THIRDS of Marylanders continue to work remotely post-pandemic, those who brave the daily commute are overwhelmingly behind the wheel—even when the office is less than a mile away.

A survey by UMD’s National Center for Smart Growth for the Maryland Department of Transportation offers a surprising snapshot of commuting’s

“new normal”—but also indicates a desire by respondents for more sustainable modes to work, says Chester Harvey, director of the center’s Transportation Policy Research Group.

“The good news is a lot of the infrastructure is in place,” he says. “The trends we’re seeing will help MDOT evaluate opportunities for investments in transit, sidewalks and bike lanes that are efficient and inviting.”—MH

DRIVING THE POINTS HOME

90% of commuters regularly drive (even if their trip is less than 1 mile)

The average commute would take 5 times longer by bus or train vs. car

Vehicle miles traveled in Maryland have dropped 17% since the pandemic

35% of commuters live within 5 miles of work

Wildlife Ecologist Explains How to Get Ticks Off, Not Ticked Off

LOOKING FORWARD TO roasting marshmallows by a campfire or harvesting a bounty from your garden? Look out for a little something ready to crash your fun: ticks, tiny bloodsuckers that emerge in full force this time of year.

Assistant Professor Jennifer Mullinax, a wildlife ecologist in the Department of Environmental Science and Technology leading studies in Maryland to reduce tick-borne illnesses, offers explanations and tips for tick-free summer fun.—KS

HOW THEY GET YOU: They climb up a bush or tall grass, wave their little arms and wait for something to brush by, then latch on.

WHAT YOU COULD SUFFER: Lyme disease, which can be treated with antibiotics if caught early, but can become a severe chronic disease if not; anaplasmosis, which causes fever, chills and muscle aches; or Alpha-gal syndrome, an allergy to a molecule in red meat.

HOW YOU CAN PROTECT

YOURSELF: Spray the insecticide permethrin on your clothing and shoes outside and let them dry before wearing. Choose long

pants and close-toed shoes. From May to October, get naked after you’re in risky areas, looking at every crevice. If you gently pull off a tick within 24 hours, it likely hasn’t had time to give you anything.

HOW TO TICK-PROOF YOUR PROPERTY: Create a three- to four-foot mulch barrier next to woods or brush, or fence it to keep deer out. Buy tick tubes or make them with cotton balls soaked in permethrin placed inside toilet paper rolls. Mice take fibers back to their nests and repel ticks. Do this for a couple years, and you’ll help reduce the prevalence of these diseases nearby.

ISTOCK; PHOTO BY ERIK KARITS / PEXELS

An On-Campus Oscar Nominee

Researcher Executive-Produced Lauded Documentary

A CONTEMPLATIVE DOCUMENTARY about two brothers who nurse injured birds of prey back to health in New Delhi dominated the film festival circuit before earning a trip to the Academy Awards for a UMD biologist who doubles as a film studio head.

Sean B. Carroll, the Andrew and Mary Balo and Nicholas and Susan Simon Endowed Chair, also runs Tangled Bank Studios at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, where he is vice president of science education. He served as executive producer for “All That Breathes” by filmmaker Shaunak Sen, which competed in March for the Oscar for best documentary, a category won by “Navalny.”

Although “All That Breathes” touched on many of Tangled Bank’s key themes involving the interconnectedness of nature, Carroll admits he wasn’t sure it would snare American audiences. He was surprised by its wins at the 2022 Sundance and Cannes film festivals—and was flummoxed by the necessity of procuring a tux for the Oscars ceremony: “Dressing up for me is below dental work in terms of things I prefer,” he says.

His studio is typically involved in educational or heavily science-based films, making the documentary an outlier—in the best possible way, Carroll says: “It has been a magic ride for all involved.”—CC

Roll Over, Paper Towels Engineers’ PickerUpper Is Even Quicker

IT’S PAPER TOWELS to the rescue for soda spills and tomato sauce splatters, while gauze often soaks up blood in the operating room. Now, UMD engineers have elevated the cleanup game using a hydrogel that takes the familiar form of a dry, foldable sheet—but absorbs three times more liquid.

The method, which the team presented in the journal Matter, may one day find a home in kitchens, bathrooms or medical settings. Unlike typical hydrogels, which are made of a web of large molecules known as polymer that soak up more than 100 times their weight in water, the new material stays flexible, rather than crumbly, when dry. “We reimagined what a hydrogel can look like,” says Srinivasa Raghavan, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering.

The gel sheet soaked up nearly an ounce of spilled water, drip-free, within 20 seconds, while even a cloth pad only absorbed about 60% of that amount and left drips. The hydrogel saved the day with thick liquids as well—syrup, blood and even test fluids a million times more viscous than water.

A Season of Healing

REI-Funded Center Promotes Nature-Based Research and Reparation

The new wekesa Earth Center, part of UMD’s School of Public Health, is rooted in West Africa, but its promise to offer deeper understanding of the human-nature connection will come to fruition in College Park and around the country.

“Wekesa,” which means “born during harvest time,” will conduct research on the connection between nature and wellness, offer programming that offers people new ways to interact and feel a belongingness with the natural world, and discuss the ways that land-based brutalities and injustices like lynchings or forced exiles of indigenous people have manipulated the land as a tool of creating harm and perpetuating anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism.

In recognition of her nature scholarship, Associate Professor of kinesiology Jennifer Roberts received a grant of $160,000 from REI’s Cooperative Action Fund, the nonprofit branch of the outdoors company, to establish the center. The Wekesa Earth Center will be led by Roberts and Shannon Jette, also an associate professor of kinesiology. The fund supports organizations that seek to rectify the longstanding exclusion of people of color from activities like

Antidote to Overdoses: A Universal Treatment

New Compound Fights

Both Fentanyl and Meth in Bloodstream

A FREQUENT LIFESAVER during opioid overdoses—naloxone, marketed as Narcan—can’t help when the victim has abused methamphetamine or another non-opioid drug.

hiking, mountain biking or climbing, and promotes justice, equity and belonging in the outdoors. A 2021 Outdoor Industry Association survey found that nearly 75% of people who participated in outdoor activities are white.

Wekesa Earth Center officially launched in April with on-campus forest bathing, in which people spend time in nature for physiological and spiritual well-being. This fall, the center will host a workshop at Abiquiu, N.M.’s Ghost Ranch, most famous for its association with artist Georgia O’Keeffe. There, 25 scholars will discuss topics like green space, belongingness, ecological reparations and nature justice.

The center represents an expansion of Roberts’ and Jette’s NatureRx@UMD, a chapter of a national movement encouraging people to go outside to improve their mental health.

“I really wanted to make sure (the center) was something that would promote equity, reconciliation and healing in regard to nature and increasing belongingness,” says Roberts.—sl

UMD scientists aiming for a universal treatment to counteract a rising tide of overdose deaths—106,699 in 2021 alone—have created a new chemical compound shaping up as a promising antidote for both meth and the opioid fentanyl.

The team led by Lyle Isaacs, a professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, reported in the journal Chem that its new compound, Pillar[6]MaxQ, also binds strongly to drugs like

PCP, ecstasy and mephedrone. Unlike naloxone, which stops narcotics from binding to receptors in the brain, the UMD team’s “molecular container” targets drugs circulating through the body.

“Our compound soaks up the drug in the bloodstream and, we believe, helps promote its excretion in the urine,” Isaacs says. “This is known as a pharmacokinetic process, where we’re trying to minimize the concentration of free drug that’s present in the body.”—EMILY C.

NUNEZ

TOP PHOTO BY STEPHANIE S. CORDLE; BOTTOM PHOTO VIA ISTOCK

Keisha Prawl-Woods, director of financial services in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, attends Wekesa’s kickoff event, forest bathing on campus.

Why Noncompetes Could Soon Be a Non-Thing

Maryland Economist’s Studies Fueled Federal Drive to Ban Controversial Employee Contracts

WACKY STORIES OF fry cooks who can’t move to a competitor’s grill for a raise, or mid-level execs with ambition and a bright idea who can’t start their own firms make noncompete agreements easy to hate. A recent proposal by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that would ban most noncompetes is based heavily on research by Evan Starr, a UMD associate professor of management.

Starr, an economist, has spent years studying the use of these agreements for both low-wage workers and employees with specialized skills, documenting their sometimes-crippling effects.

The FTC was still gathering comments on its proposed rule this spring when Starr spoke to Terp about the growing move to curb noncompetes and his own experience with them.—CC

What’s the silliest noncompete clause you’ve heard of?

When I was in grad school, my wife volunteered for Girls on the Run International, a nonprofit that takes girls running after school. At the end of her signup form was a two-year noncompete agreement to the effect that you could not start or even help any after-school physical education program for girls.

For people never confronted with a noncompete, why should they care?

We tend to think of noncompetes in isolation—a given worker signs one. But what happens when a whole labor market is bound by noncompetes? If most firms use them, how can anyone start a new firm? And if someone does start a new firm, who can they hire? As a worker, who is going to give you a job offer if you want a raise? Our main finding in one paper was that in places with widespread, enforceable noncompetes, the entire labor market is less dynamic. You may be

affected by someone else’s noncompete and not even know it.

Your research underpins a lot of the Biden administration’s deliberations on this, as well as pending FTC rules. Where does all the interest come from?

Much of it is a continuation of concerns from the Obama administration. In 2014 we had the Jimmy John’s case where noncompetes were being used for minimum-wage sandwich makers, and there was the case of Amazon asking temporarily employed packers to sign 18-month noncompetes that prohibited them from working in any industry anywhere in which Amazon was selling anything. It was extreme.

What’s likely to happen?

I do expect the FTC will move forward with their rule. There’s a question of whether it will cover everyone or if there will be carveouts for top executives. In the short run, if the FTC’s rule goes into effect, there will likely be legal challenges, and a decision will be made as to whether the proposed rule will be allowed to come into effect as the courts address the challenges.

FACULTY Q&A EVAN STARR

AN END TO THE BLEEDING

The mayor of Knoxville, Tenn., picked up a UMD researcher’s book on preventing gun violence. The resulting partnership could be a model for how cities can create safer streets.

BY SALA LEVIN ’10 PHOTOS BY JOHN T. CONSOLI

one evening in february 2021, Janaria Muhammad stepped out of her house in Knoxville, Tenn., to meet friends at her favorite restaurant, Kings and Wings. Recently turned 15, Nana, as everyone called her, was a perpetual source of energy for those around her. She reminded her brothers to keep their grades up, helped her dad navigate new technology so much that he teased she was his secretary, shimmied with the dance team at Austin-East High School, and babysat neighborhood kids and cut hair for pocket money.

“She was like the sun,” her father, Lawrence Muhammad, told The Washington Post. “When you saw her, you lit up.”

That night, Nana didn’t make it past her yard on Selma Avenue before the darkness got her: She was hit twice by a drive-by shooter. Her father rushed outside and held her as she died—the third of five Austin-East students lost to gun violence before the end of spring.

To mark the second anniversary of Nana’s murder, dozens gathered outside the squat brick building that houses East Knoxville’s YWCA Phyllis Wheatley Center, where she regularly came after school to do homework, play basketball and snap pictures with friends. Friends and relatives, along with community members and leaders, clutched purple balloons—the color she’d chosen for her bedroom—under a gray, oatmeal-textured sky.

Her parents spoke to news cameras, pleading again for help finding her still-unidentified killer. “If we don’t get justice in this life, we know that we will get justice in the next,” said Jacquelinne Muhammad, Nana’s mother.

Confronted with 40 other homicides that year and desperate to lead her city to a safer future, Knoxville Mayor Indya Kincannon picked up a book that promised a straightforward approach to reducing gun crime: “Bleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence—And a Bold New Plan for Peace.”

In it, author Thomas Abt, a University of Maryland associate research professor, delivers a set of evidence-based action items: focus a range of prevention efforts on those likeliest to be perpetrators or victims; keep a closer eye on areas likeliest to experience violence; and employ people who know the world of street violence intimately to act as mediators.

As Kincannon read the book, she was struck by the feeling that “it was written for mayors,” she says. “It’s research-based, but it’s also very, very practical.” She emailed Abt to ask him more about his ideas, laying the groundwork for what’s becoming a central part of the city’s anti-violence strategy.

Knoxville is the first city to partner with Abt’s Center for the Study and Practice of Violence Reduction, or VRC. Formed shortly after his arrival at UMD’s Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, the center, funded partly by the private philanthropy organization Arnold Ventures, seeks to conduct research on minimizing gun violence, and to offer its expertise for free to municipalities around the country. Partnerships with other cities, including Boston, are in the works.

“The mission is very simple,” says Abt. “We want to save lives by stopping violence, using science. As we measure our progress, that will be the question: Have we saved lives?”

knoxville police officer Conner Wiesenberg has the kind of “how’s your dad doing?” familiarity with neighborhood regulars that Abt prizes, because it opens doors for peaceful solutions to problems that could escalate to bullets flying. He graduated from Knoxville Central High, and played on its basketball team with kids from Lonsdale, a neighborhood that experienced violence then, too. “It would not be uncommon for us to be on a traffic stop and somebody rolls by, calls my name out, it’s somebody that I know,” he says.

On foot patrol one bone-chilling February evening in Lonsdale Homes, a subsidized housing community, Wiesenberg and his partner, Andrell Cummings, point out a small square of pavement where someone has spray-painted a design, including the word “Pache,” the nickname of a neighborhood resident accidentally shot and killed last May during a dispute he’d been trying to defuse.

Knoxville and cities around America are increasingly littered with symbols of tragedy. In 2020, amid a pandemic, political toxicity and civic upheaval, the U.S. reached a startling new peak: 79% of murders involved a

gun, the highest since at least 1968, according to the Pew Research Center. Other numbers also painted an unsettling picture: In 2021, the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive recorded the most gun deaths, 45,107, since its 2013 founding.

While suicides and domestic violence make up a significant number of gun deaths, Abt’s focus is urban or community violence, defined in “Bleeding Out” as occurring “outside the home, on the streets or in other public spaces where people congregate.” Muggings gone too far, gang rivalries, personal disputes that play out in parking lots or on street corners—those are his terrain.

Knoxville, a hilly city of roughly 190,000, outstrips most other U.S. cities of its size in rising violence. In 2022, its homicide rate was 21.4 per 100,000, more than double in 2018 and roughly triple 2022’s national rate. While U.S. cities saw a 30% increase in homicides from 2019 to 2020, Knoxville’s surged 68%.

In 2022, Kincannon, in conjunction with the Knoxville Police Department, hired Abt (then chair of the Violent Crime Working Group at the think tank Counsel on Criminal

Justice) and other experts to analyze gun violence in the city, determining who and what was fueling it and recommending policies to reduce it.

This data-centric approach appealed to Kincannon, who aimed for a plan not based on emotion or rhetoric—the sort of thing that makes news for a day or two and then disappears. “I didn’t want to just do a headline. I wanted lasting change.”

Abt and the team examined the 82 homicides and 188 nonfatal shootings in Knoxville from 2019 through 2021. The trio found that, in a city that is 75% white, a large majority of victims and perpetrators were Black men aged 18 to 34, and at least 59% of shootings involved members of gangs (or groups, as Abt calls them). At least 63% of shooters and victims had had previous contact with the criminal justice system.

violence or whether violence is going to happen in a certain place is whether it’s happened in the past,” Abt says.

He bases his approach on three principles: focus, balance and fairness. First, he says, law enforcement and city services should be concentrated where crime occurs most and the narrow subset of people responsible for the worst offenses. They’re who criminologist Lawrence Sherman, a UMD distinguished university professor, calls “the power few.”

Taken too far, this risks the problems New York City had with “stop and frisk” policing, in which 90% of those stopped by the NYPD from 2003 to 2021 were people of color. Baltimore experienced what critics say were similar excesses during former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley’s mayoral tenure, when he approved widespread arrests for minor offenses like loitering.

Abt says law enforcement can avoid discriminatory overpolicing in part by working with community members to determine who in the neighborhood poses a true threat. “You go to these neighborhoods, and people will tell you who is doing what—but only if they trust you,” says Abt. That’s far different, he says, from an approach that treats every person of color or inhabitant of certain neighborhoods like a suspect.

Abt’s second tenet is balance, or “the notion that balancing prevention and punishment works far better than either approach in isolation.” Street outreach workers who locate suspected members of the power few might try to connect them with therapy, get them involved in community programs or direct them to housing or job assistance.

“You need to target services and support to some of the supposedly least sympathetic people,” says Abt.

Finally, fairness—or legitimacy—is the linchpin in assuring that these interventions work according to plan. The impact of laws must be “felt equally across social groups,” Abt writes; they must be enforced “according to widely accepted values, including transparency, impartiality, proportionality and equality.”

These concepts and conclusions from the data led Abt and his team to make a number of recommendations to the city in fall 2022. A few months later, the city is “under construction with a new way of policing,” Knoxville Deputy Police Chief Tony Willis says. “What we want is our officers to get a call, and it’s no longer 12 Cherry Street. It’s the Smith house.”

born and raised in Cambridge, Mass., Abt was exposed early to the idea of using data to address social problems by his father, Clark Abt, an MIT-trained researcher whose social science think tank, Abt Associates, takes on issues like public health, education and economic mobility.

Abt’s interest in violence reduction was fueled by his own close-to-home shock. In 1999, while attending Georgetown University Law Center, he taught a class at a local high school. One student “sat in the back, was extremely disconnected, often slept through major portions of class,” he recalls. Gradually, as Abt worked to engage him, he became more responsive. One of Abt’s mentees from the program later asked if he’d heard about the kid in the back of the class: He’d been murdered.

Years later, as he began writing “Bleeding Out,” Abt searched unsuccessfully for details. “I contacted the homeroom teacher.

“The single most reliable indicator about whether someone’s going to be involved in

Knoxville police officers Andrell Cummings (left) and Conner Wiesenberg look at a memorial to a resident killed last year. The police department is incorporating violence redution methods presented by UMD’s Thomas Abt (above).

The mission is very simple. We want to save lives by stopping violence, using science.”

—THOMAS ABT, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND ASSOCIATE RESEARCH PROFESSOR

He was like, ‘Thomas, I can’t tell you how many students I’ve lost. There’s just no way I could possibly pick this one out among all the others.’”

Abt went on to examine this problem of violence from the perspective of a teacher, a prosecutor, a government official and an academic. After law school, he worked as an assistant district attorney in New York County, followed by time at a law firm and as voter program director for the 2008 Obama presidential campaign. Post-election, Abt joined the Department of Justice as chief of staff to Assistant Attorney General Laurie O. Robinson, who prioritized “bringing sound science and reliable data into the criminal

justice decision-making process,” he says. Robinson calls Abt “somebody who can cross those lines and bring important knowledge from research into the world of hard decisions on the practical side.” He would demonstrate that as New York’s deputy secretary for public safety, where he initiated the Gun Involved Violence Elimination (GIVE) program, and later in a five-year fellowship at Harvard, when he wrote “Bleeding Out.”

Critics like Jeffrey Butts, director of the Research and Evaluation Center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, say Abt’s philosophy takes a fast-action approach to problems with deep roots, potentially neglecting “people who talk about fundamental causes and long-term solutions,” he told The Atlantic in 2019.

Abt agrees systemic approaches like reducing poverty, improving education and creating job opportunities are all essential, but says that unlike preventing shootings—“as a matter of practical reality, those things are not achievable in the near future.”

Two things primarily separate the VRC from other centers focused on gun violence: its all-hands approach, which incorporates a spectrum of ideas on enforcement and prevention; and its work with elected leaders and grassroots activists at no cost to implement new methods and ideas.

Abt is “uniquely qualified to help lead this effort and also to coordinate other initiatives at the university that are centered

around violence research,” says Rod K. Brunson, interim chair of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice and senior policy adviser to the VRC. He is “one of the thought leaders in this space.”

down secluded Adcock Avenue in Knoxville, Wiesenberg points out a low-slung house where he used to drop off basketball buddies after school. In April 2020, Anthony Sanford, one of them, was killed here, shot in the back in what appeared to start as a drug deal.

Later that night, Wiesenberg, an officer on the Community Engagement Response Team (CERT), got a call saying that neighbors and witnesses were stonewalling investigators, but that “there are some people up here that are name-dropping you.” Wiesenberg went to the house alone and gleaned information that eventually led to the arrest of a suspect.

That kind of relationship is essential to CERT, a unit that focuses exclusively on violent crimes with the kind of communityfirst policing Abt encourages. Each night, CERT officers walk through neighborhoods, asking residents how things are going. An anonymous tip line also lets citizens text officers.

Denzel Grant represents another branch of the violence reduction ecosystem. As leader of the violence interrupter program Turn Up Knox, Grant works with kids at risk and adults who have actually committed violent offenses, offering programming, mentorship and resources for help finding a job or place to live.

Grant saw violence at an early age. In 1998,

What we want is our officers to get a call, and it’s no longer 12 Cherry Street. It’s the Smith house.”

—TONY WILLIS, KNOXVILLE DEPUTY POLICE CHIEF

UMD Researchers Lead 120 Initiative on Gun Violence Reduction

Other University of Maryland researchers are tackling the problem of gun violence with a variety of approaches. Joseph Richardson Jr., the Joel and Kim Feller Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology, and Rod K. Brunson, interim criminology and criminal justice chair and professor, are groundbreakers in the field of violence reduction.

Denzel Grant leads Turn Up Knox, a program to keep kids and adults from violence. Such organizations are critical to reducing violence, says Abt. his cousin, Andre Stenson, was pulled over for driving without headlights. On parole and driving without a license, he ran from police, who wrestled him to the ground and handcuffed him. He died on the way to the hospital, after saying that he couldn’t breathe. (A federal jury later ruled in favor of the officers in a lawsuit.)

“I always had the passion for (community work) ever since,” says Grant, who was in elementary school at the time. “I’ve just been doing it ever since.”

Grant has made unexpected connections. “We have become pretty good friends,” says Deputy Police Chief Willis, “and I would not have bet one dime on that occurring.” But Grant has become “a powerful partner” in helping police de-escalate potentially volatile situations.

Knoxville native LaKenya Middlebrook is responsible for ensuring these disparate elements cohere. In 2021, the mayor appointed Middlebrook director of community safety,

a role in which she links citizens, law enforcement, civilian oversight committees and school districts to implement Abt’s recommendations.

Gun violence is “an issue that is so frontof-mind and so deeply personal for so many folks in our community that people want to help,” says Middlebrook. “They want to be a part, they want to figure out what role they can play, they are really open to thinking about how we can do things a little differently.”

Much of Turn Up Knox’s youth programming takes place at the YWCA. At the ceremony commemorating Nana Muhammad’s death, Grant, Middlebrook and others held their balloons as Nana’s father, Lawrence, talked about his daughter. “She’s that tree where all the seeds fall off and other plants grow,” he said.

Afterward, those gathered released their balloons and watched them soar, far beyond where any tree could snag them. terp

Their work is part of the 120 Initiative to Reduce Gun Violence—a D.C.-area coalition of higher education institutions founded by UMD President Darryll J. Pines and George Mason University President Gregory Washington to focus research expertise at the problem. (Its name honors the number of people who die on average daily from shootings in the U.S.)

Richardson (above) pioneered an intervention strategy that begins as soon as gunshot victims are wheeled into the emergency room. He talks with patients in their hospital beds, learning their stories and beginning the process of connecting them with resources like legal aid or mental health counseling.

Brunson’s (right) work focuses primarily on the relationship between law enforcement and the community. His most recent study examined how place-based factors influence the decisions law enforcement officers make.

For details on the 120 Initiative’s new recommendations, visit go.umd.edu/120InitiativePaper.

DECONSTRUCTING MARYLAND’S OPEN HOUSE

AS UMD CELEBRATES 25 YEARS OF MARYLAND DAY, WE SHARE BEHIND-THESCENES STORIES AND STATS

BY ANNIE KRAKOWER

A STROLL THROUGH CAMPUS on the last Saturday in April is like experiencing a university turned inside out. All the gooey and fizzy experiments, soaring artistic excursions and amusing oddities of academic life—ready to make friends with a giant bug?—are on display in a sea of tents around McKeldin Mall and elsewhere, rather than tucked away in labs or classrooms.

In one corner of campus, you can watch engineers spark—and then extinguish—a raging fire tornado, while in others, you can learn the steps of a folk dance, build a DIY indoor air filter or discover how autonomous drones navigate the world.

Peppy drumbeats and horn swells from the marching band provide a spirited soundtrack, and homemade liquid nitrogen ice cream and international cuisine cooked right before your eyes tempt your taste buds. Lines wind through this temporary campus carnival, with eager guests queuing for swag ranging from T-shirts to toy turtles to tomato plants.

This is Maryland Day, and since 1999 the one-day campuswide open house has grown into a mix of eclectic entertainment and enrichment that regularly draws more than 80,000 visitors to 300-plus events.

In his 1999 inauguration speech, former University of Maryland President C.D. “Dan” Mote, Jr. outlined this vision for “one of the biggest rituals in the history of the university.” He later recalled his thinking then: “We’re the flagship university of the state of Maryland. How do you connect if you don’t show the public what you are, who you are, what life here is like?”

Some 3,000 volunteers rolled up their sleeves that first year to prep campus for guests who showed up to “explore our world,” as the inaugural theme instructed, through activities like musical performances, bounce houses and a football scrimmage.

To celebrate 25 years of this Maryland merriment, we’re unwrapping the tradition, revealing backstories, secrets, stats and memories from longtime volunteers and other participants about the big day.

PHOTO BY STEPHANIE S. CORDLE

LET THEM EAT CAKE

The university’s 150th anniversary called for a big celebration: a strawberry shortcake to feed 50,000 Maryland Day visitors. The baking extravaganza began in January, with staff cooking up sections that could serve 90-100 people each, adding strawberry filling, ladling on sauce and freezing the pieces in “every freezer we had” on campus, says Joe Mullineaux, interim director of Dining Services and a Maryland Day volunteer since year one. To top it off, UMD’s executive pastry chef crafted a 12-foot chocolate university seal. The last slice was served just before 4 p.m., and volunteers were “covered from head to toe in vanilla frosting and strawberry—hair, shoes, clothes, everything,” Mullineaux recalls.

…AND CUPCAKES

The cake idea was so sweet that Dining Services outdid itself a couple years later to commemorate the 10th Maryland Day: Instead of one giant treat, the staff made 54,000 little ones. Around 100 volunteers stayed up the night before to arrange colored cupcakes to form the UMD seal, earning shirts with “Maryland Day” written in cupcakes as a reward. College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences Director of Operations Gene Ferrick recalls crashing in his office afterward to be ready for Maryland Day in the morning—and he still has the tee.

200

Flags on display each year on Hornbake Plaza, representing countries, U.S. territories and commonwealths, and Maryland’s own distinctive banner.

CAKE, CUPCAKE PHOTOS BY JOHN T. CONSOLI; FLAG PHOTO BY TYLER ECKER

2 ,000K AT 14 0 MPH

The temperature in Kelvin (a whopping 3,140 degrees Fahrenheit) and rotational speed of fire tornadoes like the one created each Maryland Day by the Department of Fire Protection Engineering in a room with special swirling air currents.

ROSIE, STINKY AND TWIGGY

The names of the Chilean rose tarantula, vinegarroon and Vietnamese walking stick that have regularly appeared at the popular insect petting zoo. UMD presidents, spouses and kids have held lady beetles, eaten cicadas or searched for the queen honeybee at the event, says Mike Raupp, professor emeritus of entomology known as “The Bug Guy.” Rosie and Twiggy have even gotten up close and personal with Dr. Oz and Connie Chung, he says. And don’t worry—the beloved bugs have never made a break for it or taken a bite out of an unsuspecting guest.

TORREY TRANSPORT

Former star Terp and NFL wide receiver Torrey Smith ’10 regularly showed off his wheels on the football field, but on Maryland Day 2013, UMD Police Department

Executive Assistant Lisa Church provided his ride. Smith, who was on campus to assist with a youth football skills event, needed to get from the Xfinity Center to the Stamp Student Union, and Church happened to be there with her golf cart. “I freaked out,” she says. “I am a huge Maryland fan, but also a very huge Torrey Smith fan.” The pair, along with Smith’s sisters, stopped at the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources’ Ag Day, grabbed some Panda Express and high-fived those who recognized him along the way. “It was my favorite day of work ever,” Church says.

TORREY SMITH PHOTO COURTESY OF LISA CHURCH; BUG GUY PHOTO BY JOHN T. CONSOLI

visiting University Archives’ taxidermized diamondback terrapin, the model for the bronze Testudo statues. Since the inaugural event, she’s stitched an estimated 15,000 crafty critters. COVID cancellations allowed her to stockpile this year’s meaningful amount, matching the year UMD was chartered.

GET THE SCOOP

Maryland Day has frequently provided the stage for the Maryland Dairy to debut its newest creations. UMD presidents often provide the ice cream inspiration, like Mocha Latte Mote to honor Mote’s 2010 retirement, VanniLoh Mango to celebrate Wallace D. Loh then taking the helm, and TerraPines and Pralines to mark President Darryll J. Pines’ first in-person Maryland Day last year. To commemorate 25 years of Maryland Day, the Dairy revamped and resurfaced one particularly delectable concoction, Too Good, originally made in 2017 in honor of UMD becoming the nation’s first Do Good Campus. The Too Good Silver Edition, available only on this milestone Maryland Day, featured 150-year-old Grand Marnier, chocolate imported from South America and France, and a mocha tiramisu swirl with Ethiopian coffee beans.

QUICK CLEANUP

Besides handling signs, tents and other logistics, Facilities Management faced a doozy of an obstacle the day before Maryland Day 2011. A blocked pipe caused sewage to flood McKeldin Mall, sending staff scrambling to install fences, vacuum up the mess and disinfect the area. “Whoever was available, we would get out there and start cleaning,” says Audrey A. Stewart, an FM coordinator and Maryland Day volunteer since the beginning. The main tent and a few smaller tents had to be moved, but otherwise, the show went on for the nearly 97,000 guests.

1 , 200 Testudo bobbleheads handed out during Maryland Day 2022. The free mini mascots went fast, but guests could still get their hands on one if they dug into their pockets: The collectibles quickly showed up on eBay, selling for $40 or more.

1 5 , 000

Floating toy turtles tossed into the ODK Fountain each Maryland Day for kids to fish out.

ROBOT REDEMPTION

On Maryland Day 2022, the student team Robotics @ Maryland hoped to make a splash with its underwater bot, Qubo. But first, members spent two allnighters repairing and revamping their hand-me-down submarine, one with a wild network of sensors, computers and devices to power eight thrusters. “We finished an hour before guests began arriving—it was that close,” says Vice President Dillon Capalongo ’24. Qubo went on to participate in that summer’s international RoboSub competition, making it to the semifinals.

“Diary of a Wimpy Kid” books signed by author and illustrator Jeff Kinney ’93 at Maryland Day 2011. As a student, he created a popular comic strip in The Diamondback satirizing life as a Terp. He says he put the best parts of “Igdoof” into the adventures of Greg Heffley.

ANNE TURKOS, FOUNTAIN, JEFF KINNEY PHOTOS BY JOHN T. CONSOLI; BOBBLEHEAD, ROBOT PHOTOS BY STEPHANIE S. CORDLE.

D.C. History by the Forkful

Anthropology Alum’s Food Tour Dishes Out Tales From “Black Broadway,” Taste of Immigrant Culinary Traditions

BY KAREN SHIH ’09 PHOTOS BY STEPHANIE S. CORDLE

Bellies full of D.C.’s most famous hot dog—a half-smoke smothered in chili, to be exact—we were dutifully following our tour guide down U Street when he halted in the middle of a block.

I glanced around the alleyway: trash and recycling bins, overgrown weeds, a car or two, nothing remarkable. Scaffolding stretched between the buildings on either side of us, offering a little shade from the midday sun.

Then our guide told us why we were there. Fifty percent of D.C.’s Black population once lived in alleys like this one, he said. Originally constructed for horse and carriage storage, they ended up crowded with makeshift housing, sheltering entire communities during the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Today, the area is largely gentrified—yoga mat-toting residents who glanced curiously as they walked by made that clear—but longstanding businesses harken back to D.C.’s

past. Partially obscured by the scaffolding is a mural of tropical blooms and a portrait of William and Winifred Lee, who founded Lee’s Flower Shop around the corner in 1945, thanks to a loan from the city’s only Blackowned bank. The couple then invested in other Black entrepreneurs, helping to bolster “Black Broadway,” an epicenter for African American music, culture and activism that drew the likes of jazz legend Louis Armstrong and author Zora Neale Hurston from the 1920s to 1950s.

For what was billed as a three-hour foodie excursion, it was unusually deep content. But that’s the goal of Blue Fern Travel’s Fork Tours, co-created by Stefan Woehlke M.A. ’13, Ph.D. ’21 and his wife, Mary Collins. They aim not only to fill stomachs with some of the most iconic bites in the nation’s capital, but to fill minds with its often-overlooked history.

“Washington, D.C., has a very unusual

tourism market because people come to learn a national story, to see the monuments and the Capitol and the White House, not to learn about D.C.,” says Woehlke (below). “But tourists need to eat, and we realized food tours could be a way to get people into neighborhoods they wouldn’t otherwise visit.”

The company that Woehlke co-founded while pursuing his doctorate in anthropology at UMD now employs a small coterie of guides and supports a local food bank while leading eager visitors through three neighborhoods.

“Having a food tour allows you to bring people in and let their guard down and be more receptive to hearing stories about the past, especially diverse histories,” he says.

Woehlke isn’t Indiana Jones. He’s mild-mannered where Indy was gruff, and a family man with three young kids where Indy was a womanizer. But he briefly considered following the fictional whip-cracking archaeologist’s path into Central American jungles to study Mesoamerican civilizations.

A short research stint in Belize during college snapped him out of his swashbuckling dreams. “It felt kind of too disconnected from the challenges the world is facing,” Woehlke says, such as racism, sexism and economic inequality. He switched his focus to the colonial period through the 20th century, in particular revealing the untold stories of African Americans who persevered

through enslavement, discrimination and segregation. After earning his bachelor’s degree from George Mason, he spent the bulk of his time at fourth President James Madison’s home, Montpelier, where he researched the lives of the African Americans who were enslaved there, as well as how they and their descendants navigated the transition to post-Civil War freedom.

As he continued his research on this—the subject of his dissertation—he discovered he also wanted to spread his love of history to different audiences, and that the love of food he shared with his wife could be the link.

“We realized when we connected with local communities (in our travels), it was always over a meal,” he says, such as a red snapper speared by a neighbor as a welcome gift in the Virgin Islands or a lively backyard asado (barbecue) that helped travelers surmount language barriers in Chile.

Collins took a business pitch to a local competition and won the $500 people’s choice award, which they used to start the company in 2014.

In the early days, Woehlke wanted to pack in so much history and try so many dishes that the tours stretched nearly five hours, with tastes at eight restaurants. “People got a lot for their money, but some guests couldn’t keep up,” he says.

Today, they’ve halved the number of stops and walk less than two miles over three hours, which allows guests to enjoy bigger portions and time to digest between savory dishes and dessert on their tours in Old Town Alexandria, Georgetown and U Street—the first one they launched, and still their most popular today.

Just a year after D.C. became the country’s first majority-Black big city, Trinidadian immigrant Ben Ali and his fiancée, Virginia, opened Ben’s Chili Bowl on bustling U Street in 1958, introducing to the community what was, by the standards of the time, a spicy concoction. Patrons included Martin Luther

King Jr., who set up an office just down the street; jazz legends Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington, who performed at clubs nearby; and students and faculty from historically Black Howard University, half a mile away.

This was near the end of U Street’s heyday as Black Broadway. Since the late 19th century, Jim Crow laws and segregation had pushed Black intellectuals, artists and entrepreneurs to develop separate areas where they could live and thrive. In that era, U Street’s Black-owned banks, shops and clubs were born.

D.C.’s robust Black population stemmed in part from Camp Barker, set up during the Civil War to hold enslaved people who were considered contraband from the South. When President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, many of them chose to stay and forge a new life in D.C., building homes to create the beginnings of U Street. (To be sure, Black people have lived in what’s now D.C. since before the nation’s founding, and enslaved people helped build the White House, the Capitol and other iconic buildings that tourists flock to today.)

In the 1960s, African American civil rights activists gathered at Ben’s Chili Bowl. And when King was assassinated in April 1968, U Street fell victim to racial riots. Protesters burned down business after business, though they spared Ben’s, which went on to feed activists and first responders alike.

The area fell into disrepair after that, but through the decades, even as the crack cocaine epidemic spread and construction of the Metro’s Green Line blocked the street, Ben’s remained. The subway line opened, and luxury apartments and trendy restaurants started popping up—part of the gentrification of D.C., as the Black population shrank from more than 70% during its “Chocolate City” days to just 45% today. But Ben’s remained, and even expanded to Ben’s

Next Door (yes, literally next door), offering a more upscale dining experience.

It was that “remarkable continuity” that prompted Woehlke and Collins to approach the Ali family. The concept of a food tour was so new in D.C. that the Blue Fern founders were initially turned down at other restaurants when they pitched their idea—but when Ben’s co-owner Nizam Ali (son of the founders) agreed to work with them, more doors opened.

“They do a really good job of telling this rich history,” Ali says. “We feel it’s our role, being this anchor here on U Street, to teach people about Black Broadway. D.C. isn’t about the federal buildings. It’s about the people, the culture, the music.”

That’s what Woehlke focuses on as he designs the tours, drawing on UMD sociology Distinguished University Professor Emerita Patricia Hill Collins’ lessons on

Opposite page: Mural of William and Winifred Lee, who founded Lee’s Flower Shop on U Street in 1945; at right: Kamal Ali, one of the co-owners of Ben’s Chili Bowl and son of founders Ben and Virginia, flips sausages on the grill.

“They do a really good job of telling this rich history. … D.C. isn’t about the federal buildings. It’s about the people, the culture, the music.”

—NIZAM ALI, CO-OWNER OF BEN’S CHILI BOWL

intersectionality. He hopes that compelling storytelling will help guests find common threads with people who have different backgrounds and experiences.

Blue Fern’s approach has detractors; a handful of online reviewers dislike the history-focused approach, and a few prospective tour guides have turned down the gig over the “progressive” nature of the content.

That’s exactly the attitude he’s trying to change. “Animosity in society is connected to ignorance,” Woehlke says. As a white man, he knows he’s not the ideal person to tell stories about Black history. But he hopes that giving his mostly white customers an easy entrée into that past through food will inspire them to take a closer look at how similar issues—discrimination, immigration, gentrification—affect their own towns, and to seek out other Black- or immigrant-owned businesses back home too.

“We’re aiming for a broader impact than just having a nice afternoon and eating some good food,” he says.

We kicked off our tour with the signature dish of D.C., a chili half-smoke (a half-beef, half-pork sausage) that President Barack Obama stopped by to try just before he was inaugurated.

“The half-smoke has a fantastic snap—it bites back as you bite into it,” said guide Jim Haefele.

Our next stop, at Ethiopian restaurant Dukem, offered a vegetarian counterpoint to the meaton-meat starter: a platter of stews and salads over sour injera flatbread, as well as lentil sambusas, fried triangular pastries.

The Ethiopian community in the D.C. metro area is the largest in the world outside of Ethiopia, Haefele said, thanks to a wave of immigration following the Communist takeover in 1974. At the time, D.C. property prices had plummeted due to the recent riots, so the new residents were able to easily buy up homes and businesses, putting down roots and offering a lifeline to family and

friends hoping to escape the violence in their homeland.

After we had our fill, Haefele excused himself to go pay—always full price and with a tip, following Blue Fern’s ethos of supporting small, locally owned businesses. It’s unusual in the food tour industry, where companies often haggle for a group discount. Since they launched Blue Fern, they’ve spent a half-million dollars at these restaurants. They also donate a portion of each ticket sold to Bread for the City, a nonprofit that

From top left, clockwise: A busy Saturday morning at the colorful Colada Shop; a scoop of roasted barley, a Lunar New Year special from Ice Cream Jubilee; and a vegetarian injera platter from Dukem, featuring stewed collard greens, cabbage and potatoes, spicy lentils and tomato salad.

“We realized food tours could be a way to get people into neighborhoods they wouldn’t otherwise visit.”

—STEFAN WOEHLKE M.A. ’13, PH.D. ’21, CO-CREATOR OF BLUE FERN TRAVEL’S FORK TOURS

provides food, clothing and social services to D.C. residents in need, enabling the organization to feed a person for a day. Blue Fern Travel has donated over 35,000 meals since its founding.

That’s something Woehlke and his wife are proud of. “Tourism brings a lot of money and moves a lot of money around the globe. But it doesn’t really go into the communities where people are living,” he says. “That’s why we decided to open a social enterprise that supports the community.”

Today, Woehlke juggles his work as a postdoctoral associate at UMD, managing the Historic Preservation Archaeology Lab and teaching undergrads about 3D documentation, with his ambitious plans for Blue Fern. In 2022, it surpassed its pre-pandemic tour numbers and now is looking to offer drink-based tours as well as expand into Baltimore.

Blue Fern also acquired a global tour company last year called Far Horizons, which offers international multiday trips led by archaeologists and other scholars with access to behind-the-scenes digs and backroom museum collections.

Closer to home, we stopped at our last two restaurants for a duo of desserts: a scoop each from Ice Cream Jubilee, where I got the roasted barley flavor, a nod to creator Victoria Lai’s Chinese heritage, and a warm pastelito from the Colada Shop—a pocket-sized ode to immigrant founder Daniella Senior’s roots in the Caribbean.

As Haefele handed us the pastries, he asked if we could tell what was inside. I crunched into the flaky square, and a pink jam came oozing out. It had a slightly tart flavor, almost like a pear, but with a tropical twist: guava, Haefele told us.

It wasn’t what any of us expected. But like the eye-opening history we learned on the tour, it was a refreshing taste of something new. terp

Tidbits From the Tour

BEN’S CHILI BOWL: A massive mural celebrates Black politicians and celebrities including longtime U.S. Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton and former D.C. Mayor Marion Barry, as well as Prince and Muhammad Ali—all of whom have eaten at Ben’s.

DUKEM: “The injera is a food and napkin and utensil, all at the same time,” says Haefele, who lived in Ethiopia for several years. He often saw restaurants

in Addis Ababa with signs that said: “Visit our sister restaurant in Washington, D.C.”

AFRICAN AMERICAN CIVIL WAR MEMORIAL: The walls surrounding the statue feature nearly 210,000 names, honoring people of color who fought for the Union Army.

THE FLORIDA AVENUE GRILL: The nation’s oldest continuously operating soul food restaurant once had margins so thin that

“they operated two chickens at a time,” says Woehlke. They butchered and fried up the first two in the morning, and only bought more once those were sold.

FRANCIS L. CARDOZO

EDUCATION CAMPUS: The massive gothic building, known as the “castle on the hill,” was built in 1917. Today, it enrolls 800 middle and high school students, far less than its capacity of 1,100, as a result of white flight from D.C. Public Schools.

BUCK HILL MURAL: The 70-foot-tall painting honors the mailman and jazz musician who played in U Street clubs with the likes of Miles Davis.

THE COLADA SHOP: The colorful café evokes pre-revolutionary Cuba. Founder Daniella Senior says she sought out the diverse neighborhood. “This area represents such a beautiful array of different cultures, and I’m proud to be a part of that.”

Letter From the Executive Director

WE EACH HAVE a unique story and a remarkable journey to share. And periodically, we each could use a reminder of just how amazing we are.

This spring, we dedicated time to do just that at our inaugural Women’s Leadership Development Conference, which brought together an inspiring panel of alums for a day of empowerment and personal connection. (See story at right.) One of the messages that resonated with me was from Tanasha Dalton MBA ’16, founder of WHOA (Women Helping One Another), who encouraged us all to embrace our inner champion.

Like many elite institutions, we have expanded our career resources to support alums who are looking to start, advance or pivot careers and entrepreneurial endeavors. We recently added to them, launching a monthlong virtual mentorship program, Terps Thrive, that paired Terp mentors and ambitious mentees based on career industries. We are truly grateful for our incredible mentors who volunteered their time to help others reach their goals.

As your Alumni Association, our mission is to better serve and connect our global community so that more Terps may lead a life of meaning and impact through unique alum-to-alum engagements like this one. Whether it’s finding a stepping stone to advance a career, a referral to do business with a fellow Terp or mentorship across disciplines, our alums can pursue their passions fearlessly with the strength of their alum network behind them.

This academic year has been one of tremendous growth for our community. We welcomed thousands of new members, celebrated record-breaking event participation, introduced new learning experiences and had fun while doing it all.

Stay fearless, forever.

Amy Eichhorst

Associate Vice President, Alumni and Donor Relations Executive Director, Alumni Association

From the “Big Brother” Set to the Olympic Stage

4 Exceptional Young Alums Share What They’ve Learned About Friendship, Family and the Fun of Doing Good

Areality tv personality, Olympic speed skater, TikTok executive and master mead-maker walk into a room … and, no joke, impart a lot of good advice.

On April 3, four young alums headlined Terps Under 30, an Alumni Association and Student Alumni Leadership Council signature event on campus designed to bring together students and alums to connect and share how they are moving fearlessly forward.

Amy Eichhorst, associate vice president of alumni and donor relations, and executive director of the Alumni Association, reminded the audience that UMD has 405,000 living alums. “That’s a lot of alumni all doing amazing things and really making an impact on the globe.”

Read on to hear what these UMD grads had to say.—sl

THOMAS HONG ’20 , 2018 OLYMPIC SPEED SKATER AND MEDICAL STUDENT AT THE GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE AND HEALTH SCIENCES

“Once I was finished with skating, it gave me all this time to reflect on what I really wanted to do. And I realized that within speed skating, once you take the sport out of it, it’s really the relationships and the interactions I had with people that resonated with me. So when I came back to Maryland, I was studying finance, but planning so that I could get into a field where I would have (those relationships). I decided, after talking with mentors and loved ones, to go into medicine. It was a long journey, but I’m happy that my experiences in sports have translated this far.”

RACHEL LIPMAN ’15 , HEAD WINEMAKER AND GENERAL MANAGER, LOEW VINEYARDS

“I came up against a lot of challenges, being a young female in a male-dominated industry where most of the winemakers are double my age. I have over 10 years of experience in this industry because of the fact that I was able to immerse myself in every aspect while working part-time to full-time with my grandparents.”

ALEXANDRA GIVAN ’16 , GLOBAL COMMUNITY DEI PROGRAMS LEAD, TIKTOK

“I’m responsible for making sure our underrepresented creators have equitable experiences they can safely create on the platform, and really just making sure folks who have been minoritized and who are marginalized have a better experience on TikTok. I work across 24 markets. It’s a global scope, and I’m having the most fun I’ve ever had.”

DEREK XIAO ’19 , “AMAZING RACE” SEASON 34 WINNER AND “BIG BROTHER” CONTESTANT

“Before I make any big decision in my life, there’s a couple key people that I call, and I actually met all of them at Maryland. One of them is this guy Mike. Mike was like, ‘Take “Big Brother.” When you’re 50, 60, you have kids, maybe you have grandkids, what are you going to wish that you did? Are you going to wish that you took that job and sat behind that desk for 15 years and tell them about how you helped one company buy another company to go buy another company? Or do you want to sit down on the couch, pull up the tapes of “Big Brother,” show them 90 days of your life, and tell them, ‘This is me at 25,’?”

Terp Sisters, Doing It for Themselves

New Event Celebrates Women

“THERE’S ROOM for all the girls.”

That was the message Monica McNutt M.Jour. ’13 (right) delivered to nearly 300 alumnae on March 3 at the Alumni Association’s inaugural Women’s Leadership Development Conference at the Samuel Riggs IV Alumni Center.

As the keynote speaker, the ESPN reporter and basketball analyst urged women to support one another as they make professional strides.

McNutt was among 20 women—all of them UMD alumnae or university leaders—who spoke at the event on topics ranging from wealth creation and management to building a personal brand to health and wellness.

“The main goal is building community amongst Terp women and enhancing the network that is available to them,” said Erica Lane, the Alumni Association’s manager of volunteer programs, who co-organized the event.

McNutt shared her story from growing up as a girl who loved basketball through her current role. She also told attendees about feeling the difficulties of being a Black woman in the workplace: At one station, she yearned to be sports anchor, but when the blonde, white woman who held the position departed, she was replaced by another blonde, white woman who, McNutt said, “had zero interest in sports.”

Though frustrated and jealous in the moment, McNutt eventually understood that by seeing one another as comrades, not competitors, women can widen the circle for others.

“I needed to find it in myself to truly root for other women, because their success is not coming at my expense,” she said —SL

MCNUTT PHOTO BY LISA HELFERT

Party Queen, Behind the Scenes

Alum Highlights Black Chefs, Artists at NYCBased Event Agency

As a young grad working for NBC in New York City, Amber Mayfield ’14 could have been dazzled by the entertainment industry parties she attended. But as she saw the same caterers, performers and marketing firms being hired again and again, she realized something was missing, and it wasn’t crab cake bites or bubbly.

“Most of these folks didn’t look like me,” says Mayfield. She decided to build her own event business—one that prioritized chefs of color and women-owned businesses and artists overlooked by traditional agencies.

She bootstrapped her first few dinner parties—including hosting one in a kitchen-less basement in Harlem— before launching To Be Hosted, a supper club and event planning company, in 2017. Today, she curates documentary premieres and holiday parties for the likes of supermodel Iman and Netflix, and has become a national entertaining expert, offering tips on “Good Morning America” and in Vogue. She was also named to Forbes’ “30 Under 30” media list in 2022.

“I feel like they really outed me,”

Mayfield says. “The number of people who said, ‘I didn’t know you were so young!’”

Her early success is thanks in part to the experiences she gained as an undergrad. She interned at the Samuel Riggs IV Alumni Center, where she assisted with weddings and conferences; she also planned Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc.’s 40th anniversary celebration on campus and co-hosted a major public relations conference in Washington, D.C.

Mayfield poured all of that—along with a love of parties inherited from her mom—into To Be Hosted. Through word of mouth and long hours, she steadily gained clients until the pandemic hit. She pivoted to launching an annual magazine, While Entertaining, to continue to highlight Black food and beverage makers. She’s now on her fourth edition, and juggles that with events that are back in full swing, including 15 last year.

Now she’s expanding to additional

cities, including D.C., where she can continue working with friends. Potential collaborators include fellow Terps Wendell Alston ’14, certified sommelier, and painter Lexis Jordan ’13. Her goal is to stay community-driven and -focused, she says, even as her circle expands.

“For me, it’s about creating social experiences that are incredibly equitable and feel welcoming to everybody,” Mayfield says.—ks

PHOTO BY RASHIDA ZAGON

Fete With Flair

Whether you’re hosting a Fourth of July barbecue or celebrating your new grad, Mayfield offers tips to make a splash at your summer gathering:

LEAN ON NOSTALGIA: Remember the thrill of the last day of school? Capture that with fun ice pops or other retro details. “Keep it whimsical before everyone gets all serious and asks you about what you’re going to do now that you’ve graduated.”

CHILL OUT: Everyone loves burgers and hot dogs, but grills add heat to already scorching summer days. Mayfield recommends putting frozen fruit in a cooler or pulling a salad out of the fridge, along with plenty of cold drinks, to keep guests comfortable.

CREATE CONNECTIONS: “Most people make introductions in a way that only tells them how they know you, the host,” she says. Focus on shared backgrounds or interests instead, so they can start a conversation— and you can slip away to keep the party going.

Serving Up TimeHonored Flavors Fast

Friends’ Fresh Take on Indian Cuisine Expands Across D.C. Area

SIX YEARS AGO, lifelong friends Sahil Rahman ’12 and Rahul Vinod ’11 asked customers to “tikka chance” on a new kind of restaurant: one that blended traditional Indian flavors with a modern, fast-casual eating experience.

That chance panned out, and this spring, Rahman and Vinod opened their fifth Rasa location, in Rockville, Md. It’s also the pair’s first location in their home state, after getting their start in Washington, D.C., and Virginia.

For Rahman and Vinod, Montgomery County isn’t just where they grew up—it’s also where their fathers, Surfy Rahman and K.N. Vinod, jointly opened the 31-year-old Bombay Bistro, a family-friendly Rockville institution, and later, D.C.’s stylish Indique.

When the younger Rahman and Vinod would bring their friends to their parents’ restaurant, they noticed that the unfamiliar menu often puzzled them, but that they loved the dishes. “What we realized was that it wasn’t maybe an issue of the food itself, but just how people were being

introduced to the food and the culture,” says Vinod. After studying business at the University of Maryland and working briefly in the corporate world, the younger Rahman and Vinod decided to try a new, fresh approach to Indian restaurants. Inspired by their high school and college meals at Chipotle, the two spent several years planning Rasa (“essence” in Sanskrit), including finessing the menu (with cleverly named dishes like Aloo Need Is Love and Tikka Chance on Me), securing funding, scouting a location, designing the interior and learning the basics—like how to cook.

Critics loved it. Tom Sietsema of The Washington Post praised Rasa’s “deliciously nuanced ‘Home Cooking,’ thin rice noodles and gingery shrimp that share their bowl with wrinkly green beans, mango salsa and mango coconut yogurt,” he wrote in 2018.

Early in the pandemic, Rahman and Vinod used their restaurant—and the then-on-hold second location, in Mt. Vernon Triangle—to do some good. They partnered with star D.C. chef Jose Andres’ World Central Kitchen to distribute some 50,000 free meals to medical professionals and other first responders.

The pandemic didn’t stop the business from growing. In 2021 and 2022, Rasa opened in Crystal City and Fairfax’s Mosaic District, and the business now counts roughly 90 employees.

“While we’ve got big ambitions, we also hope to bring it back home to College Park one day, too,” says Rahman.—SL

SAHIL RAHMAN ’12 AND RAHUL VINOD ’11

Following the Yellow Brick Road

Alum to Head International Wizard of Oz Club

The annual telecast of “The Wizard of Oz” was “an almost religious ritual” for Ryan Bunch M.A. ’01. Growing up bookish, gay and the youngest (by 11 years) of four kids on a cotton farm in Louisiana, he needed to believe in a real-life Emerald City—some other place where friendship and adventure in Technicolor awaited him.

Bunch went on to make his childhood fixation the centerpiece of his academic, professional and off-the-clock pursuits, most recently publishing the book “Oz and the Musical: Performing the American Fairy Tale” (Oxford University Press), based on his master’s thesis. In August, he will become president of the 66-year-old International Wizard of Oz Club.

“I really found inspiration and satisfaction from the books and movies and TV shows that I was consuming as a child,” he says. “And I just never lost the enthusiasm for those things.”

He was already a fan of the 1939 movie when, during the summer after third grade, his mom encouraged him to read L. Frank Baum’s “Oz” series. Soon, he was acting out the stories and imagining conversations with Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion, Tin Man and Scarecrow.

His mom paid the $10 membership fee for him to join the International Wizard of

Oz Club, and soon, Bunch’s parents began taking him to “Oz” conventions in Oklahoma, Illinois and California. “My mother says she never knew what that $10 was going to end up costing her,” Bunch says.

After taking piano and violin lessons and singing in a “little country church,” Bunch initially pursued music performance at Hendrix College in Conway, Ark., but soon realized he was “more interested in history and scholarly writing about music than practicing for five hours a day,” and switched his focus to musicology.

At Maryland, he studied “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” as a queer anthem and the film as a touchstone for LGBTQ+ communities.

The connection between “The Wizard of Oz” (and star Judy Garland) and the queer community has always been strong, says Dina Massachi, an Oz scholar and visiting lecturer at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “Oz has a slew of nontraditional characters. There is this embrace of the weird, the alternative and the nonconformist, which really is an American value if you think of how this country was founded, and who it was founded by and what they were trying to do.”

Bunch’s book analyzes four musical adaptations of the story—the original 1903 Broadway show, the film, and “Wicked” and “The Wiz”—as depictions of characters “navigating between specific identity and the idea of belonging to a utopian idea of what America is and who belongs in it.”

He will juggle his work as a doctoral student in childhood studies at Rutgers University-Camden with his duties leading the roughly 700-member Oz club for a year. The group produces the

thrice-yearly Baum Bugle, a print magazine that features scholarly articles, interviews with Oz-lebrities like collectors or actors from adaptations, and other items to quench fans’ thirst. The club also hosts conventions and contests.

“Ryan is one of those people who flips between multiple worlds,” says Massachi, a club member. “He’s definitely a lifelong fan, so he gets the fandom, but he … understands the academic world and grounding of it, too.”—sl

PHOTO BY JOHN T. CONSOLI; ILLUSTRATION BY VALERIE MORGAN

Renovation Sensations

Thousands Follow Alums on TikTok, Instagram

IF HIS WARDROBE of University of Maryland tees is any indication, Alex D’Alessio ’18, M.S. ’19 is a proud grad. But the Terp often quips that he’s also a University of DIY YouTube alum.

His experiences at both alma maters contributed to “Real Life Renovation,” a social media video series documenting his home improvement adventures with wife Kylie D’Alessio ’18 around their Baltimore rowhouse. They’ve amassed 370,000 followers on TikTok and 145,000 on Instagram.

People posting plumbing, drywall and painting tutorials on YouTube and elsewhere online “never talked about mistakes, so I just assumed that they were perfect,” Alex says. “It was honestly disheartening watching all this perfection, so I wanted to do ‘Real-Life Renovation’ and show all the real-life parts of it.”

He studied civil and environmental engineering before earning his master’s in project management, then landed a job at Clark Construction, which sparked his fascination with building and renovation. In August 2020, Alex and Kylie moved into their 120-year-old house and soon revamped their laundry room, recording the process for family and friends who “didn’t really believe we were pouring cement,” he says.

The couple moved on to their circa 1980s half-bathroom with dingy wood floors. He posted a video of the project—“talking like how I talk,” he says, with a stray curse word or two—and went to work one day with virtually no TikTok followers. He came home to 10,000, plus 300,000 views.

The fast-paced posts garnered enough social media interest for brands like Wagner and the Home Depot to approach Alex about advertising, leading him to take “Real Life Renovation” full time—at their own home and beyond. The transition has been another learning process, Kylie says, but the couple has settled into a routine a la HGTV’s “Flip or Flop” or “Fixer Upper,” with Alex leading the construction and Kylie spearheading the design.

The Terps have incorporated a few UMD-themed ideas, like creating a dry bar featuring a Maryland bottle opener. More Terp touches could be in store as he and Kylie enjoy the renovation ride.—AK

CLASS NOTES

Two entrepreneurs appeared this spring on the ABC show “Shark Tank:” ARSALAN KHODABANDELOU ’12 pitched his pet rescue app, Woof, to the sharks in March; ORI ZOHAR ’07 , owner of single-origin spice company Burlap & Barrel, appeared in April.

ASMA NAEEM PH.D. ’10 , a former New York prosecutor turned museum curator, was named director of the Baltimore Museum of Art, making her the first person of color to lead the institution in its 109-year history.

JONATHAN W. WHITE M.A. ’03, PH.D. ’08 was co-winner of the $50,000 2023 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, honoring his book, “A House Built by Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House.” He is a professor of American studies at Christopher Newport University.

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore appointed PAUL MONTEIRO ’02 , a former director of AmeriCorps Volunteers in Service to America, to be the first secretary of the new Department of Service and Civic Innovation, which will support service opportunities for high school graduates.

Poet SHARA MCCALLUM MFA ’96 was named a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, an honor granted to 171 scholars and artists. Her 2021 anthology, “No Ruined Stone,” imagines poet Robert Burns working as a bookkeeper on a plantation worked by enslaved people in Jamaica. She is the Edwin Erle Sparkes Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University.

KELLI BILLISH-FITTER M.A. ’94 , a women’s water polo pioneer, national team member from 1984-91 and FINA World Championship bronze medalist, was inducted into the United States Water Polo Hall of Fame.

ALEX ’18, M.S. ’19 AND KYLIE D’ALESSIO ’18

PHOTO BY JOHN T. CONSOLI; ILLUSTRATIONS BY KOLIN BEHRENS

Underexposed

Can You Help Us Identify These Terps?

TERPS “SKANKED” to music by D.C. ska-punk band the Checkered Cabs at Art Attack in 1995, according to the limited information on file with University Archives. But do you recognize any of these flannelled friends—or can you explain their rockin’ dance steps? Let us know at terpfeedback@umd.edu and check back next issue, where we’ll publish the responses we receive along with another eye-catching photo.—AK

PHOTO COURTESY OF DIAMONDBACK PHOTO COLLECTION, UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES

IN THE SLING OF THINGS

Geology major Helen Hutchinson ’24, from Cambridge, Md., kicked back in her kicks in a hammock on McKeldin Mall in April. She was among many students who embraced the tradition as the weather warmed up.

PHOTO BY HONG H. HUYNH

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IMAGINE A CLIMATE OF HOPE

CLEAN POWER. REVIVED FORESTS. PLENTIFUL FOOD. Our more than 200 researchers and experts and robust partnerships with NASA, NOAA and other federal agencies are creating vital solutions for a global crisis. From using satellites to track forest loss and improve agriculture to developing tools to better predict extreme weather and natural disasters, we’re committed to saving the planet—and the turtles

Investing in research to solve the climate crisis: Another way the University of Maryland is leading Fearlessly Forward. fearlesslyforward.umd.edu