Between the Columns: September 2015

in this issue

UPSCALE EATS PG. 2 /

AMATEUR EXPERT PG. 3 / ACCOLADES PG. 3 / WEB MD PG. 6 / BUGGED OUT PG. 7 / A UMD WONDERLAND PG. 8

Between the Columns a newsletter for faculty & staff of the University of Maryland September 2015

What’s it Like for Families to Work and Study at UMD?

“ Greater” Dining on the Menu Upscale Eateries Part of College Park Redevelopment

BY LAUREN BROWN

UMD MAIN ENTRANCE

M

High-end dining in College Park?

Coming right up.

The pickings for faculty and staff are about to expand beyond the typical college town fare of pizza, burgers and subs.

The new Greater College Park initiative has united the university, city and private and public partners to bring in $700 million in new investment in academic buildings, downtown amenities and a research hub, expanding beyond the campus’ traditional boundaries.

One priority has been to ensure more “grownup” residential and retail options for UMD and the university's research park employees—and finer food isn’t just a side order. Upcoming options include an upscale steak-and-seafood restaurant, a big-name Greek eatery and a wine bar and café, all just minutes from campus.

“It will be worth leaving campus to take a walk or a bike share to one of these places,” says city Director of Planning Terry A. Schum. “The options and the selection have been improving over the years, and we have even more to look forward to in the future.”

1

COLLEGE PARK BALTIMORE

AVENUE (ROUTE 1)

1. THE HOTEL AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND // 7777 Baltimore Ave. Last known as: Greenhouses > Old Maryland Grill by Mike Franklin: Fine dining from the owner of Franklin’s Restaurant, Brewery and General Store in Hyattsville, featuring seafood, steaks and an in-house bakery > Kapnos Taverna by Mike Isabella: Upscale, small-plate Greek fare from the “Top Chef” all-star and Graffiato DC owner > Bagels ’n Grinds: New York-style bagels baked on site, sandwiches, salads and soups > Potomac Pizza: Gourmet pizzas featuring nonfat, cholesterol-free dough and sauce made from scratch daily 2. ART HOUSE // 7416 Baltimore Ave. Last known as: The Barking Dog > A café and a live performance space in proposed partnership between Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center and Philadelphia music venue MilkBoy

2 3

4 K N OX R OA D

3. NANDO’S PERI-PERI // 7400 Baltimore Ave. Last known as: Ratsie’s Terrapin Eatery, David’s Shoe and Yogiberry > Portuguese chicken, along with sandwiches and salads plus beer, sangria and wine

GUILF

5

ORD R OA D

4. MINI PARK // 7413 Baltimore Ave. Last known as: The Little Tavern > Food trucks, a few parking spaces and a landscaped, parklike space for outdoor dining

NEW COLLEGE PARK LOAN PROGRAM OPENS DOORS FOR HOMEBUYERS Want to live closer to the food? The new College Park City-University Partnership Home Ownership Program offers a $15,000 loan to UMD employees who buy a house anywhere in College Park.

The zero-interest loan is for down payment 2 btc SEPTEMBER 2015

or closing cost assistance, and becomes partially forgivable if you remain a university employee and live in the house for five or more years. After 10 years, the entire loan is forgiven.

The goal is to increase the number of UMD employees living in the city; the figure stands at less than 4 percent.

For more information, visit collegeparkpartnership.org/homeownershipprogram.

5. DISTRICT 21 COFFEE & WINE BAR // 7131 Baltimore Ave. Last known as: College Park Auto Parts > Café with organic coffee, craft beers, wine bar and gourmet sandwiches and breakfast fare

ACCOLADES UMD won the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments’ 2015 Commuter Connections Bike to Work Employer Challenge, with 161 Terp registrants.

An Expert on Amateurs Prof Explores Intersection of Work and Hobbies

BY LIAM FARRELL

Stanley Plumly, director of creative writing, won the 2015 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism for his book, “The Immortal Evening: A Legendary Dinner With Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb.”

Reinhard Radermacher, engineering professor and director of the Center for Environmental Energy Engineering, won the 2015 J&E Hall Gold Medal and the International Institute of Refrigeration’s Gustav Lorentzen Medal.

Stephanie Lansing, an assistant professor of environmental science and technology, won the Council on the Environment’s Junior Faculty Award.

Atmospheric and oceanic science Professor Eugenia Kalnay was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Foundation for Personality and Social Psychology inducted psychology Professor Arie Kruglanski into its Heritage Wall of Fame.

Michigan State University recognized Sharon Harley, associate professor of African American studies, as one of the top historians in the field of U.S. black women’s history.

Photos by John T. Consoli

As a researcher focused on citizen science and a self-taught photographer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Andrea Wiggins knows the power of do-it-yourself knowledge.

“Anyone can be an expert if they can focus their attention in the right place,” she says.

Wiggins, an assistant professor in the College of Information Studies, runs the Open Knowledge Lab that studies how bringing together amateurs and open data enhances scientific exploration.

Although backyard astronomers and bird watchers have made contributions for decades, modern online communications have vastly expanded the potential and opportunities for volunteers. One of her projects, Biocubes, focuses on having volunteers record what they find in one cubic foot of natural habitat.

“You never knew there were so many wriggling things in a bucket of seawater,” Wiggins says.

Taking stock of the world is second nature for her. As an AmeriCorps volunteer after graduating from college, Wiggins picked up a secondhand camera and started taking pictures and tinkering with the devices. She has whittled her collection recently, but still has around two dozen plastic and antique cameras, including a 1950s spy camera.

“Photography gives you a certain skill for documenting things,” she says. “It puts a literal frame around the world. It trains you to be observant of details that are often missed.”

With a strong interest in nature, Wiggins has also seen more than 400 different species of birds, including endangered Hawaiian honeycreepers.

All of this—citizen science, photography, birding—meshes in her efforts to always be looking more deeply at the world around us.

“It’s an entire additional layer of reality,” Wiggins says. “It’s something I can always enjoy, like taking apart a camera.”

SEPTEMBER 2015 btc 3

What’s it Like for Families to Work and Study at UMD?

BY KAREN SHIH '09

It might be the best perk you can earn while working at UMD: free tuition for your kids.

But while you’re picturing weekly lunches at Chipotle and Friday night rides home full of chatter about the week, your daughter might be worried she’ll end up like Beca from “Pitch Perfect,” with Dad knocking on the dorm room and demanding to know why she missed that 9 a.m. class.

To kick off the new academic year, BTC talked to three pairs of Terp faculty and staff members and their students, who range from incoming freshmen to recent graduates, to get their take on what it’s like for family to work and study on the same campus.

>DAVID SUMNER, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, HVAC OPERATIONS

>ALYSON D’APICE, ACCOUNTING ASSOCIATE, NATIONAL CENTER FOR SMART GROWTH >MEGAN D’APICE ’19, ANIMAL AND AVIAN SCIENCES

Megan’s love of animals is what drew her to Maryland, where she’s excited to work with cows and sheep at the Campus Farm—­and finally become a vegetarian. “I wanted to be one when I was younger,” she says, but she couldn’t completely make the switch at home.

Alyson says, “It was great when we came to orientation and she got to talk to Dining Services about the different options.”

4 btc SEPTEMBER 2015

Megan juggled scholarship offers from other schools, but for the aspiring veterinarian, the opportunities at Maryland were too good to pass up. The competitive gymnast plans to join the club team and keep up with her running—­maybe right by her mom’s office in Preinkert. “I’ll be after her for snacks, probably,” Megan says.

“I’m really looking forward to her coming here,” says Alyson, who predicts she’ll take some dirty laundry home and share the car at times. “It relieves a lot of the nerves of the first child going off to college.”

>ERIC SUMNER ’16, JOURNALISM (LEFT) >ADAM SUMNER ’17, ACCOUNTING (RIGHT)

Boys will be boys—­and sometimes, their college shenanigans will lead to waking up in the College Park Towers with a broken hand. Luckily, Adam could count on his dad for a quick ride to the doctor’s office. “How could I be mad?” David says. “I broke both hands when I was younger. I’m just glad he made the call.”

David knew he was at Maryland for the long haul the moment his first son was born (he’s been here for 27 years). “I’m really

Photos by John T. Consoli

> WENDELL HILL, PROFESSOR, PHYSICS AND INSTITUTE FOR PHYSICAL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

grateful for the tuition remission,” Adam says. “Otherwise we’d have to rely more heavily on loans or go to community college.”

They see their dad every so often for lunch at his favorite spot, Three Brothers, (or occasionally when they run out of money), but most of the time, they keep busy schedules that include freelancing for The Diamondback, working part-time jobs and pursuing a double degree.

“He trusts us to do our own thing,” Eric says. “He’s not hovering over us, but he’s there as backup if you need him.”

>ESHE HILL ’14, GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS

Eshe grew so comfortable in her dad’s office she’d fall asleep on his couch—­only to be abruptly woken up and shooed out when a student needed to see him. “He could have given me a couple minutes’ notice!” she says, laughing. As the only one of Wendell’s three daughters to come to Maryland, she formed a special bond with her dad, she says—­and getting the car keys for an occasional shopping trip was a bonus. “I knew if I was having a bad day, I could talk about everything I was going through,” she says.

Wendell, who’s worked at Maryland since 1982, never pressured his daughters to choose UMD, but brought them to many Maryland Days, summer camps and women’s basketball games as they were growing up. “When they were babies, they came and I’d show them off to all the staff,” he says. But when Eshe enrolled, he took a step back. “Give students space,” he says. “This is their university, and you have to allow them to have their experience and teach you things and show you things in their world.”

Now, Eshe is across the pond at the London School of Economics. When she graduates next year, she hopes to work on human rights issues—­and her dad’s got his fingers crossed that’ll bring her back to D.C. SEPTEMBER 2015 btc 5

A RECORD-BREAKING YEAR UMD, led by the staff in University Relations, reached a new milestone in fundraising in fiscal year 2015, crashing through the $200 million mark, thanks to a record number of donors.

Congratulations!

$201,699,435.67 TOTAL RAISED

41,264 UNIQUE DONORS

23,322

UNIQUE ALUMNI DONORS

282 NUMBER OF 50K+ GIFTS

227

UNIQUE DONORS OF 50K+ GIFTS

Web MD

Online Doctor Reviews Are a Good Resource, Research Says

BY CHRIS CARROLL

When doctors, patients and the Internet collide, trust can get smashed in the middle. Will patients believe the positive reviews they see online for the “lifesaver” pediatrician or a “great” orthopedist? Will doctors’ reputations be dragged down by disgruntled and anonymous commenters?

It turns out everyone can loosen up a bit, according to a pair of researchers in the Robert H. Smith School of Business.

In a new report, Gordon Gao, associate professor of business, and Ritu Agarwal, professor of business, demonstrate that those online reviews do reflect patient satisfaction fairly accurately.

“There are multiple ways to measure a doctor, and the online reviews are a good way to measure the patient experience—the doctor’s listening ability, how nice he or she is, cleanliness of the office,” said Gao, the lead author.

Meanwhile, patients actually don’t tend to venture online to sling mud at doctors very much, he said. In fact, a better measure of bad doctors might be a lack of online reviews, perhaps because the worst might be practicing in areas with low rates of Internet access, or because patients fear doctors will sniff out bad reviews and retaliate, the authors say.

Along with coauthors Brad N. Greenwood Ph.D. ’13 of Temple University and Jeffrey McCollough of the University of Minnesota, Gao and Agarwal compared online reviews with the results of surveys designed by the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to reach their conclusions, which was scheduled for September publication in MIS Quarterly.

But Gao warns there’s more to doctor quality than patient satisfaction.

Because most patients can’t fully judge a doctor’s true acumen, he and collaborators are working to delve into clinical skill, knowledge and outcomes as well.

“Our work shows the reviews are a good way to find a doctor you can communicate well with,” he said. “But it’s not a good way to judge their clinical skills.”

FEARLESS IDEAS

UMD President Wallace Loh greets the latest generation of Terps at the Department of Resident Life’s New Student Welcome in August.

6 btc SEPTEMBER 2015

Every issue of Between the Columns features our students’ and faculty’s discovery of new knowledge.

In this issue, we further highlight those efforts. We’ll be doing the same in future issues on our efforts to inspire Maryland pride, transform the student experience and turn imagination into innovation.

President Loh photo by Thai Nguyen

BUGGED OUT Entomology Researchers Turn to Public for Help Collecting Stink Bugs

BY KAREN SHIH ’09

If the stink bug population of your house took a nosedive, you’d hardly complain. But for entomology Professor Emeritus Galen Dively and graduate student Chris Taylor, the sudden crash of their lab’s 13,000-strong stink bug collection in March presented a crisis.

With experiments prepped and no good way to collect new bugs during winter hibernation, they asked the public to trap any emerging insects in attics, cellars and dark corners and send them to College Park.

“We did it on a whim,” says Taylor, who expected few responses. But The Washington Post, WTOP-AM and other media outlets picked up the story, and Dively was bombarded with calls from as far away as New York, Ohio and Georgia.

They ended up with about 1,000 stink bugs, limiting their reach to places within about an hour’s drive and collections of 50 bugs or more. One woman even met them in an IKEA parking lot to deliver a box, which Dively jokes must have looked like a drug deal.

But this invasive species, the brown marmorated stink

bug, is no laughing matter. Originally from Southeast Asia, these “good hitchhikers” first arrived in the United States in the mid-1990s, Dively says. Finding the mid-Atlantic climate suitable, no natural predators and ample crops to feed on, the bugs multiplied dramatically.

They threaten every aspect of crop production, shriveling leaves, stopping some fruits and vegetables from forming, and creating hard, dry patches in others.

Dively and his team need a healthy colony to research methods to control the pest. Taylor, for example, studies how nymphs depend on their symbiotic gut bacteria that the mothers secrete on the eggs, a possible weak link to exploit in the hardy bug’s life cycle.

They expect to collect several thousand more bugs on their own this fall, but it’s possible a parasite, like the sneaky microsporidia that invaded this spring, or a virus could hit again (the bugs’ close quarters allow otherwise uncommon infections to flourish quickly).

“It’s nice to know if we have a problem, people are willing to help out,” Taylor says.

{DIVERSITY Tip}

By Kumea Shorter-Gooden, chief diversity officer and associate vice president

NOV. 1–7, 2015 IT’S A DRAMA-FILLED FOOTBALL CLASH BETWEEN THE TERPS AND WISCONSIN BADGERS. AND IT’S SO MUCH MORE. TERP HOMECOMING SERVICE DAY // COMEDY SHOW // STEP SHOW // TERP CARNIVAL // ARTS PERFORMANCES // TERP TOWN FOR A FULL CALENDAR OF EVENTS, VISIT HOMECOMING.UMD.EDU.

President Obama recently enjoined us to fight the “impulse to call Johnny back for a job interview but not Jamal.” How often do we select someone—for a job, promotion, special assignment, admission or membership—who is familiar and disregard a person who may be just as deserving? There’s a human tendency to clone ourselves and avoid those who're different. We need to fight that initial impulse and press the “pause” button. Only by proactively working at this will we level the playing field and build a diverse and just campus community.

Look for more Diversity Tips in future issues of Between the Columns!

SEPTEMBER 2015 btc 7

Estonian artist Navitrolla’s Chesire Cat smiles at the Alice that English illustrator John Tenniel drew for the original book in this mashup of Wonderland interpretations.

A Classic Tale University Libraries Celebrate “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”

BY LIAM FARRELL

You can fall down the rabbit hole and maybe come up with a decent answer to why a raven is like a writing desk next month as University Libraries celebrates the 150th anniversary of the publication of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”

An exhibition honoring Lewis Carroll’s classic story of a young girl who enters a fantasy world of grinning cats, manic tea parties and antagonistic playing cards will open October 1 in

Hornbake Library’s Maryland Room Gallery. It will feature early editions of “Alice” and its sequel, “Through the Looking Glass,” with displays of how artists, illustrators and popular culture across the globe have interpreted Carroll’s creations.

The artifacts are from the collection of August and Clare Imholtz. Clare worked at UMD’s Center for Substance Abuse Research from 1999 until her retirement in 2010.

The couple became interested in collecting when August was writing an article on translations of the famous nonsense poem “Jabberwocky” and discovered the secretary for the Lewis Carroll Society of North America lived in Maryland. Now, the pair has 4,700 Carroll books, including 160 Russian “Alice” editions.

“It’s just a wonderfully amusing and clever book,” Clare says. “I hope (exhibit visitors) go home and read their ‘Alice.’”

Douglas McElrath, the acting head of Special Collections and University Archives, says the exhibit will show the “universality of Alice as a cultural figure.”

“It really is more than a children’s book,” he says.

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.

Between the Columns University Marketing and Communications 2101 Turner Hall, 7736 Baltimore Ave. College Park, MD 20742