in this issue ACCOLADES 2 / THRIVE TODAY 2 / TIMELESS TWEETS 3 / GOOD NEIGHBORS 6 / HAPPENING HALL 7 / STORYTELLING SCIENTIST 8
between the columns a newsletter for faculty & staff of the university of maryland APRIL 2016
ACCOLADES Professor of the Practice and Fischell Department of Bioengineering namesake Robert E. Fischell M.S. ’54 received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the highest honor for technological achievement bestowed by the president of the United States. Anya Jones, assistant professor of aerospace engineering, received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.
GET READY TO THRIVE UMD HAS LAUNCHED an initiative
UMD’s Wye Oak Building won a
Wintergreen Award from the Maryland Chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council for excellence in green building design standards. Distinguished University History Professor Ira Berlin received the American Historical Association’s Award for Scholarly Distinction. The School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies was named best theatre program by Maryland Theatre Guide. The Society for Risk Analysis awarded the 2015 Chauncey Starr Distinguished Young Risk Analyst Award to Abani Pradhan, assistant professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Science and Center for Food Safety and Security Systems.
this spring to foster a thriving work environment—and your participation is essential to its success. The Thriving Workplace Initiative, sponsored by the Office of the President, is meant to foster a culture of engagement, inclusion and empowerment among all employees. Until May 6 , all faculty and staff are encouraged to fill out a survey, administered by Gallup, about their workplace experiences. All employees with a UMD email address should use the link they received via email to take the survey online in English or Spanish. Gallup will also administer paper versions for those who don’t have computer access or speak a different language.
The five- to 10 -minute survey is confidential, and Gallup will return only aggregated results to UMD. These results will be analyzed in summer and shared with divisions, schools, colleges, units and departments in fall. Consultants from UMD’s Center for Leadership & Organizational Change (CLOC) will help units understand the data and take action, from facilitating conversations on the state of the group and action planning sessions to individual coaching and training. The survey will be re-administered in 2017, to evaluate progress and highlight successes. MORE DETAILS can be found at president.umd.edu/thrivingworkplace.
Betty Malen, professor of education policy, received the University Council for Educational Administration’s Jay P. Scribner Mentor Award. Antonio Busalacchi, professor of atmospheric and oceanic science and director of the Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center, and James E. Hubbard Jr., the Samuel P. Langley Distinguished Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering, were elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
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Thousands of volunteers come together to make the 18th annual Maryland Day a success. Thank you for welcoming our guests, showcasing the best of UMD and sharing your Terp spirit.
Mulch Madness
Twitter Treasure
umd Researcher Eyes Tool to Unearth Historically Important Tweets BY CHRIS CARROLL
after a police officer killed an unarmed black teen in Ferguson, Mo., in August 2014, observers and participants in the resulting tumult sent more than 13 million related tweets within just two weeks. The unfiltered reactions of anger, sadness and determination—along with the shared logistical details of mounting a grassroots campaign against police violence that has spread nationwide—formed a trove of raw material for scholars and historians. Making sure that material isn’t buried beneath the digital sands of time is the aim of “Documenting the Now,” a umd-affiliated research project supported by a two-year, $517,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project, a collaboration between the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (mith), Washington University in St. Louis and the University of California, Riverside, aims to develop software called “DocNow” to archive Twitter data from historically significant events, with Ferguson the initial target. Currently, accessing historical Twitter data is hit or miss, and software available to scholars only captures broad swaths of tweets for a few days before they’re obscured, says Ed Summers, mith lead developer and project co-primary investigator. “There are a number of prominent researchers trying to study social media use around these issues, but it’s difficult,” says Summers, a Ph.D. student in the College of Information Studies. “We’re working… to give them a tool that’s an open-source Web application so they can begin doing data collection.” Twitter’s unvarnished, in-the-moment nature can be a source of deep insight for researchers, says Bergis Jules, university and political papers archivist at UC-Riverside. “Scholars can use the Twitter data around Ferguson to study how the public and activists on the ground communicated about the event, how those communications affected the larger media narrative, and how police and the federal government responded to the activities,” Jules says. In addition to digging up old tweets, DocNow will help Internet archivists monitor the ongoing flood of messages to help identify important content to save for posterity, Summers says. Researchers will also study the ethical and copyright implications of hoovering up social media data. “Social media is providing a view into part of our society that didn’t have much visibility before,” he says.
THRIVING PHOTO BY JOHN T. CONSOLI; FLOWER ILLUSTRATIONS BY KELSEY MAROTTA ’ 14
WERE YOU WONDERING where the M Circle’s red and yellow flowers went during the fall and spring? The combination of a stubborn fungus and a steam leak that melted an irrigation pipe kept the M mound covered only in mulch—but now, just in time for Maryland Day, the begonias are back. Here are the numbers on one of campus’s most popular landmarks:
1,200 PLANTS
40 YEARS OLD
2
PLANTINGS PER YEAR
30 cubic yards of planting soil 4 landscape maintenance workers can replant the M in one day 2 TYPES OF FLOWERS USED:
Pansies
IN THE SPRING
Begonias
IN THE SUMMER
(TULIPS AND IMPATIENS HAVE BEEN PLANTED IN THE PAST.)
Failing Up
Lessons From Terp Faculty’s Struggles
defeats, errors, botches, bungles and busts— call them whatever you want, but everyone has experienced failure at one point or another. The umd community is no different, as the road to each big breakthrough is paved with a pothole or two. What defines a Terp, though, is not letting a flat tire end the journey. Whether in the classroom, the lab or an off-campus venture, umd faculty have met missteps head-on and found success through failure. Read about just a few of them:
BACK FOR THE FUTURE Information studies Associate Professor Timothy Summers should have been on top of the world. At just 25, he had a high-paying job telling Department of Defense officials how to shore up their computer systems against cyberattacks. Personally, he was in the best shape of his life, running up to 21 miles on the weekends. Then he tore two discs in his back, leaving one leg partially paralyzed, and both of his parents fell ill. He became withdrawn and antisocial, yet in his darkest moment, he realized he could redefine success by pursuing his childhood love of hacking. That is, the good kind that involves taking things apart and repairing them to understand how they work. “Hackers think of failure as just opportunity for revision,” he says—and that’s what Summers did with his life. Reinvigorated, he developed a unique theory on hacker psychology, became an internationally renowned consultant and landed “an amazing job” teaching students about innovation and entrepreneurship.
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN T. CONSOLI AND KELSEY MAROTTA ’ 14
DEEP MISTAKE With time ticking down to launch and two different lab tests indicating the telescope for NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft was in focus, the instrument’s manufacturer and the UMD professor heading the mission decided to disregard contradictory info from a pesky theoretical model. Big mistake. Photos from the craft, which was about to send an “impactor” into a comet millions of miles away, were severely blurry because researchers had failed to take into account warping of a mirror by the lab tests’ super-cold temperatures. “The only thing we could do was figure out how to fix the camera while it was in space,” says principal investigator Michael A’Hearn, a distinguished university professor emeritus of astronomy. Eventually they realized they could use a mathematical process to reconstruct the images to look properly focused. In the end, the public and scientific community got clear images of Deep Impact blasting some of Comet Tempel 1’s interior into space on July 4, 2005, and the mission helped advance image processing science.
LITTLE BIG TIME
WORDS TO LIVE BY Bruce Auster, a journalism lecturer, was a young reporter who’d put in a couple years of grunt work at U.S. News & World Report when he landed his own beat: the Pentagon. The problem was, his stories were so heavily edited week after week that he barely recognized the words under his byline. “It’s demoralizing. And this kept happening,” says Auster. “In my mind this was a sort of fundamental failure because your whole sense of yourself is built around this thing you think you’re good at.” He finally mustered the courage to approach his editor to ask what he’d been doing wrong. “That’s all the editor needed. He didn’t have time to babysit me, but as soon as he knew that I cared, he would show me what he was doing and why and help me understand it.” Today, the NPR senior editor encourages his students to embrace failure as a necessary step to success. “The best thing you can do is work for people who are better than you.”
Today, PearsonWidrig DanceTheater company tours from Austria to New Zealand and has been written up in The New York Times and Dance Magazine. But in its early years, dance associate professors Sara Pearson and Patrik Widrig accidentally lost a valuable opportunity for exposure it desperately needed. In 1989, the company performed an aerial dance at a Lincoln Center festival, caught the eye of PBS and was asked to perform for the public broadcast service. But after seeing the studio, the duo asked for a bigger space—a request that cost them the gig. “I was so naïve at the time, but the answer should have been, ‘Yes, we can rework it!’” Pearson says.
FEARLESS IDEAS Every issue of Between the Columns features examples of how UMD turns imagination into innovation. In this issue, we further highlight those efforts with a “ .” We’ll do the same in future issue on our efforts to discover new knowledge, inspire Maryland pride and transform the student experience.
Neighbors Helping Neighbors a little rain can’t keep Terps away— especially when it is for a good cause. More than 300 volunteers came out for April’s annual Good Neighbor Day, an opportunity for umd to give back to the community. This year featured a food drive to support the College Park Food Bank, a beautification project at Hollywood Elementary School and an invasive species and litter cleanup. Good Neighbor Day is a collaboration between umd, the city of College Park and the Maryland National Capital Park and Planning Commission.
DIVERSITY Tip BY JAZMIN PICHARDO
Office of Diversity and Inclusion
IT MAY SEEM EASIER for some of us to ignore race, to be “colorblind,” because that allows us to sidestep uncomfortable conversations about racial equality. Instead, take the challenge of being “color-brave”— to recognize the role race plays in how we see ourselves and others and to engage in discussions about racial identity and disparities from a place of understanding.
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UMD President Wallace Loh greets activist Kevin Powell, a featured speaker for the Maryland Dialogues on Diversity and Community, in March.
GOOD NEIGHBOR DAY PHOTOS BY THAI NGUYEN; POWELL AND BACK-PAGE PHOTOS BY JOHN T. CONSOLI
On the Menu: New Food, Arts, Innovation Hub BY LAUREN BROWN
FOOD, THE ARTS AND EDUCATION
will come together next spring in a vibrant new center in College Park. The Baltimore development firm War Horse, owned by Scott Plank ’88 , has partnered with UMD to repurpose the vacant garage behind the Hotel at the University of Maryland. The company will transform the building into a restaurant, stage, culinaryeducation kitchen, offices and other collaborative spaces indoors and out for UMD students, faculty and the broader community. It will be the latest addition to the more than two dozen projects so far in the Greater College Park initiative. The building boom includes new academic spaces; amenities such as housing, the hotel and arts venue MilkBoy + ArtHouse; and new public-private partnerships expanding research and innovation— all extending beyond the campus’s traditional boundaries. “I’m thrilled to be back on campus using the tools I learned at Maryland
to build a fun and exciting platform for artists and entrepreneurs to collaborate,” says Plank, who is also the brother of Under Armour founder and CEO Kevin Plank ’96 . This new project will be modeled after two other recent War Horse redevelopments, Belvedere Square in North Baltimore and the Hall SF in San Francisco, both of which meld dining and the arts in neighborhood gathering places. The 9,000 -square-foot building will be revitalized in two phases, starting with the August opening of the grassy courtyard, with a grill, chairs and tables, and games that encourage outdoor dining, meeting and play. Next year, new garage doors will allow the outside in, with a covered patio, an additional 200 to 300 seats, a restaurant, a teaching kitchen, and studio recording and performing space with the potential to expand academic connections with the campus.
RENDERING COURTESY OF WAR HORSE; BACK-PAGE ILLUSTRATION BY KELSEY MAROTTA ’ 14
GREATER COLLEGE PARK, UMD’s initiative to enhance the academic campus and the surrounding communities continues to grow, with the latest announcements:
FACTGEM, a data analytics company, is moving its headquarters to College Park from Ohio. The firm, which plans to launch a series of monthly tech meet-ups aimed at students, will share space with Immuta, a data management startup, at 8400 Baltimore Ave.
FLEXEL, which develops custom ultra-thin batteries for different products, opened a research and manufacturing facility at 4505 Paint Branch Parkway, former site of Terrapin Trader. The company, born out of research at UMD, has 10 full-time employees and plans to add another 50.
APRIL 2016
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Funky Fables and Twisted Fairy Tales Astrophysicist Moonlights as Storyteller BY KAREN SHIH ’09
we’ve all heard the story of the three little pigs, or the Greek tale of Persephone and the pomegranate seeds that explains the seasons. But have you heard the one about the lonely moon who stays up later and later every night to see his friend on earth? Assistant Research Scientist Tim Livengood was looking for a fun, simple way to help people remember the moon’s shifting schedule—so he made up a story to help keep it straight. “Traditional stories have been refined and perfected, and connected with people for decades, centuries, maybe thousands of years,” he says. “They organize things you can observe in nature. What I do is create stories based on our modern imagery, modern metaphors.” But other than his two kids, who would listen to his tale? Luckily, there’s a thriving local storytelling community, which Livengood helps organize through the Grapevine series at Busboys and Poets in Takoma Park (the first Wednesday of each month) and informal story swap sessions, held at homes around the area, including his own in Columbia, Md. As a child, he spoke his first words a year after most of his peers. He’s spent the rest of his life making up for lost time. Yet it wasn’t until his first open mic night 20 years ago, shortly after the physicist started studying planetary
atmospheres at nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center, that he realized strangers might enjoy his narratives too. “It was a truly appalling story involving various horrible things and a deceased animal and bodily fluids,” says Livengood, whose confidence grew as the crowd laughed and gasped at all the right places. “A truly good personal story is not about me. It just happens to star me as an avatar for you. You think, ‘I might not have had a dead monkey puke on my shoes, but I’ve been in a situation where everything went terribly wrong’.” He hopes to see that universality reflected in the audiences at the Grapevine events, which tend to “hit opposite ends of the human lifespan” and are mainly white. As he works to bring in more diverse crowds, including inviting well-known African-American performers to speak, he thinks another group could benefit from some time with storytellers: his fellow scientists. Livengood believes his ability to capture an audience’s attention has made him a more engaging presenter and teacher. “What we communicate very poorly during the developmental process of the larval scientist is just how much time they’ll spend the rest of their life communicating,” he says. TO LISTEN to one of Livengood’s stories, visit go.umd.edu/3xg.
BETWEEN THE COLUMNS is published twice per semester by University Marketing and Communications. Story ideas are welcome and should be sent to Liam Farrell, managing editor, at lfarrel1@umd.edu or by calling 301.405.4629. The mailing list is generated through University Human Resources. Any changes to names and addresses should be made through ares.umd.edu.
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