Terp Fall 2016 by University of Maryland

L E T T E R F ROM T H E E X E C U T I V E DI R E C T OR

FALL 2016 / VOL. 14, NO. 1

PU BLISH ER

Peter Weiler VICE PRESIDENT, UNIVERSIT Y RELATIONS ADVISERS

Brian Ullmann ’92 ASSOCIATE VICE PRESIDENT, MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS

Amy Eichhorst EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

Margaret Hall EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, CREATIVE STRATEGIES MAGAZIN E STAFF

Lauren Brown UNIVERSIT Y EDITOR

John T. Consoli ’86 CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Hailey Hwa Shin ART DIRECTOR

Liam Farrell Chris Carroll Karen Shih ’09 WRITERS

Steffanie Anne Espat ’15 DESIGNER

Gail Rupert M.L.S. ’10 PHOTOGRAPHY ASSISTANT

Jagu Cornish PRODUCTION MANAGER

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350,000 the University of Maryland has one of the proudest and most influential alumni networks, with a footprint that spans the globe. But stories about the accomplishments of our university and its graduates don’t always reach the masses here and abroad. That is soon to change. Recognizing that alumni are our most valuable spokespeople, I am excited to announce the launch of our new alumni ambassador program, University of Maryland Champions. This spirited group of alumni will promote the university in a myriad of ways, whether sharing news and campus happenings, highlighting our unique programs and initiatives or sharing messages that advance the university’s mission and goals. umd Champions will tell our stories. Are you ready to be a Champion? Your role as a Champion will be entirely up to you. It could be as simple as sharing news on social media, sending an email to your closest confidants or members of your professional network, or attending a reception. And wherever you live, or whether you have just a few minutes or hours to spare, you will raise awareness and increase w i t h n e a r ly a lu m n i ,

positive recognition of the university as a world-class institution of higher education that is committed to attracting the best and brightest students and faculty while fostering excellence in teaching, research, innovation and public service. If you’re ready to share your voice to make a difference, your opportunity has arrived. Learn more about umd Champions and how you can get involved by visiting alumni.umd.edu/champions. Also, be sure to check out the new Alumni Association section on pages 38–39 to see other ways Terps are volunteering their time. The feature article highlights how alumni, students and a student-founded nonprofit joined together to package meals for those who need it in our community. The Alumni Association section will also showcase ways alumni and friends connected with each other and the university, as well as opportunities for you to participate in upcoming social, professional networking, educational or service events. Stay Fearless, umd!

Amy Eichhorst Executive Director University of Maryland Alumni Association

YOUTU BE .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 non-discrimination regarding race, color, religion, age, national origin, political affiliation, gender, sexual orientation or disability.

COVER “MAKING WAVES” ILLUSTRATION BY HAILEY HWA SHIN

Every issue of Terp features our students’ and faculty’s discovery of new knowledge. In this issue, we further highlight those efforts with a symbol ( ). We’ll do the same in future issues on our efforts to inspire Maryland pride, transform the student experience and turn imagination into innovation.

DISCOVER MORE 02 / u md, umb Aim to Make Region safe

03 / N ew Cole to Advance the Science of Sport 05 / S treamlined Design 10 / S ounds for Silence

14 / B uried in Snow 16 / Comfort Zone 17 / S how Comments 19 / Living History 22 / Making Waves 32 / T he Thick Red Line

departments

CONTENTS FALL 2016 / VOL. 14, NO. 1

IN BRIEF

The pioneering legacy of umd physicist Joseph Weber is getting a fresh look after the recent discovery of gravitational waves—which Weber controversially announced he’d found five decades earlier.

umd, umb Aim to Make Region safe

New Cole to Advance the Science of Sport CLASS ACT

Ask Anne

Streamlined Design

BY CHRIS CARROLL

Still Rocking

C AMPUS LIFE

CHANGE IN HER POCKET

Changes in Opportunity

Nationally syndicated personal finance columnist Michelle Singletary ’84 preaches the gospel of “Big Mama”: save money and avoid debt.

Sounds for Silence

A Century of umd Women

Dishing on Dining

BY K AREN SHIH ’09

INNOVATION

Buried in Snow

THE THICK RED LINE

Getting a Grip

By digitizing hundreds of Depression-era documents, iSchool researchers reveal the impact of denying loans and investment to AfricanAmerican and inner-city communities.

Comfort Zone

Show Comments

Faculty Q&A

Living History

BY LIAM FARRELL

CENTERPIECE

The Keys to Community

ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

Feeding a Need

COVER STORY: MAKING WAVES

A Welcome Start

features

FEARLESS B O LD. FU N . S M A RT. CU R I O US . PRO U D. Find new stories every week at terp.umd.edu. RECENT WEB E XCLUSIVES THAT YOU MAY HAVE MISSED :

• Anxious About New “Harry Potter” Tales? Lecturer Casts a Calming Spell • Top 10 Reasons a Bear Visited UMD • Alum Oversees Expansion of Cava Grill From Coast to Coast

UMD, UMB Aim to Make Region SAFE

IN BRIEF

Collaboration Creates Center for Human Trafficking Victims THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, COLLEGE

A Welcome Start College Park Redevelopment Expands With New Southern Gateway anchored by a high-end grocery store will revive the southern gateway to downtown College Park. The project, slated to break ground in 2018, will feature 300 luxury apartments and 100,000 square feet of retail space on the Baltimore Avenue site now occupied by the Quality Inn and Plato’s Diner. The University of Maryland College Park Foundation will acquire the 4.5-acre property next year as part of a partnership with the Bozzuto Group and Willard Retail Group.

a n ew tow n ce n t er proj ect

Other major components of the

$1 BILLION

investment boom known as Greater College Park include:

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NE W C A MPUS BUIL DINGS INCL UDING T HE REIN V EN T ED COL E F IEL D HOUSE , A . JA ME S CL A RK H A L L ( A HUB F OR BIOENGINEERING EDUC AT ION A ND RE SE A RCH) A ND T HE BRENDA N IRIBE CEN T ER F OR COMPU T ER SCIENCE A ND INNOVAT ION.

The $110 million mixed-use community is a signature piece of the university’s Greater College Park initiative, an ongoing effort to rapidly revitalize the Baltimore Avenue corridor and umd campus. Nearly 30 projects are under way or planned, including the 297-room Hotel at the University of Maryland, scheduled to open in the spring with a conference center, spa and several restaurants; and the Edward St. John Learning and Teaching Center of 22 classrooms and labs, which will also be completed next year.

A F OOD/A R T/ INNOVAT ION H A L L , L ED BY UMD A ND SCO T T PL A NK ’8 8 ’s RE A L E S TAT E DE V EL OPMEN T F IRM.

RI V ERDA L E PA RK S TAT ION, F E AT URING A W HOL E F OODS M A RK E T, H YAT T HOUSE HO T EL A ND HOUSING.

MILKBOY+ARTHOUSE, A PERF ORMING A R T S SPACE A ND F L E X EL , A RE S TAUR A N T, CUS T OM-BAT T ER Y CRE AT ED BY T HE DE V EL OPMEN T CL A RICE SMI T H COMPA N Y PERF ORMING A R T S S TA R T ED AT UMD. CEN T ER A ND A PHIL A DEL PHI A EN T ER TA INMEN T COMPA N Y.

PARK and the University of Maryland, Baltimore have joined up to provide shelter and services for some of the area’s most vulnerable people. The new University of Maryland SAFE (Support, Advocacy, Freedom and Empowerment) Center for Human Trafficking Survivors provides case management, counseling, legal and other services for adult and child victims of sex and labor trafficking. Located in College Park, the center focuses on Prince George’s and Montgomery counties and will collaborate with community organizations to conduct research and advocate for new policies. Last year, 118 cases of human trafficking were reported in Maryland, according to the National Human Trafficking Resource Center. “These young people have survived betrayal and violence and desperately need this safe harbor to rebuild their lives,” UMD President Wallace D. Loh said at the center’s opening in May. “The services they receive through this strategic partnership will truly empower their recovery.” The collaboration is part of the two universities’ MPowering the State initiative, which seeks to improve academic programs, technological research and commercialization, and public service by bringing together the complementary resources of each institution: the undergraduate, graduate and doctoral programs and research of UMD ; and the professional and graduate schools for doctors, nurses, lawyers and more at UMB . That alliance will expand under state legislation that takes effect Oct. 1. UMB will open a Center for Maryland Advanced Ventures, and UMD will create a Center for Economic and Entrepreneurship Development. The latter will develop degree and credential programs for virtual and augmented reality, neurosciences, biomedical devices, data analytics and cybersecurity.— LF

New Cole to Advance the Science of Sport THE LANDMARK FAÇADE OF COLE FIELD HOUSE STANDS

steady and familiar as ever, but inside is a tornado of activity. The sun shines onto backhoes and bulldozers rolling across the open bowl—now stripped of its seats and floor—that in a few years will be a unique complex at the epicenter of sports science. When completed in late 2018, the reinvented and expanded building will unite programs in academics and entrepreneurship, research in sports medicine and public health, and football operations and athletic training. “The state-of-the-art facility we envision will define a new era for Maryland—in athletics, in research, in entrepreneurship,” says Kevin Plank ’96, founder and CEO of Under Armour, who pledged $25 million to launch the project. Its Center for Sports Medicine, Health and Human Performance will bring together students, researchers and doctors to explore such topics as orthopedic injury prevention and rehabilitation; the role of robotics in restoring and enhancing human movement; and the impacts of sports participation on children’s development, and of stress on the performance of first responders and elite athletes. This effort will be enhanced by an expanded collaboration with the University of Maryland, Baltimore focused on neuroscience, particularly traumatic brain injury, says Bradley Hatfield, chair of UMD’s kinesiology department.

He also envisions partnerships involving virtual reality, music and dance, and athletics. “This community of coaches, scientists and faculty could make for a unique mixture of research teams to solve problems,” Hatfield says. In addition, the center will include an orthopedics clinic for the public, bringing cutting-edge science and research directly to improved patient care. Beyond those roles, Cole will give the Academy for Innovation and Entrepreneurship a hub for students to dive into these areas. It will include space designed for hands-on design thinking and startup activities. Students there will be encouraged to test ideas, build prototypes and market new products and services. “New Cole is a critical part of the strategy to engage all 37,000 students in I&E from all 12 colleges and schools,” says Dean Chang, associate vice president for innovation and entrepreneurship. Anchoring it all will be the Terrapin Performance Center, the new home for the Maryland football program. The indoor, regulation-size football field will allow year-round training, as well as recreation opportunities for all students. It will house football operations; dining and nutrition programs; and strength, conditioning and hydrotherapy centers—all creating a new center of gravity for Maryland sports.

SOUTHERN GATEWAY RENDERING COURTESY OF DESIGN COLLECTIVE , COLE PHOTO BY JOHN T. CONSOLI

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CLASS ACT

ASK ANNE Questions for Anne Turkos, the university archivist

Q: WHO WAS THE FIRST FEMALE TO EARN A DEGREE IN ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING

I HEARD THAT UMD HAS THE SKELETON OF FAMOUS HORSE GYPSY

QUEEN, WHO TRAVELED MORE THAN 11,000 MILES THROUGH ALL 48 STATES FROM 1925–27. IS IT STILL IN USE? —gary meyers A: World War I veteran Frank H. Heath of Silver Spring, Md., rode his mare across the country to raise awareness about the American Legion and show a horse’s ability. After her death in 1936, he donated Gypsy Queen’s skeleton to umd for scientific use. More than 5,000 animal science students have learned from it, estimates lecturer and veterinarian Dr. Angela Black. Because the skeleton has been handled extensively and exposed to many temperature changes over the decades, unfortunately, it has badly deteriorated. The Department of Animal and Avian Sciences can’t afford the $10,000 cost of a fully mounted equine skeleton, so last fall, Black composted the carcass of a horse that was put down due to old age and gave students the opportunity to clean, assemble and mount it. Once they finalize that project, they will ask Heath’s descendants if they want Gypsy Queen’s skeleton returned; otherwise, they will bury it respectfully.

FROM UMD, AND WHEN DID SHE GRADUATE? EVERYONE USED TO TELL ME THAT I WAS THE FIRST, BUT I JUST COULDN’T BELIEVE THAT THERE HAD NOT BEEN OTHERS BEFORE ME. —liz ten eyck ’66 A: You were mighty close to being No. 1! After examining commencement programs and yearbooks, I believe we have found the first female electrical engineering graduate: Sharon Lee Henderson ’60. We also came across a few other firsts in our search, such as Evelyn Barstow Harrison ’32, the first woman to receive any type of engineering bachelor’s degree. Other firsts include: • Charlotte Edwina Schellhas ’52: civil engineering • Gail Diane Wisser ’58: aeronautical engineering • Suzanne Hildabolt Brewer ’60: mechanical engineering

Q: WHEN WAS THE LAST YEAR THAT THE PERSHING RIFLE SOCIETY WAS AT UMD? MY ROOMMATE BOB SMITH ’67 WAS THE COMMANDING OFFICER OF THE GROUP AS A STUDENT AND LATER DIED DURING THE VIETNAM WAR. —richard w. taylor ’72 A: The last yearbook where the club appears is 1967. Looking at the general history of the Pershing Rifle Society, it looks like a lot of units disbanded during and after the Vietnam War, so it makes sense to me that the umd cadre disappeared in that time frame. We’re several months into digitizing archived issues of The Diamondback, so once we have a search interface ready, you can look through issues from that school year and see if there was any coverage around that time.

Questions may be sent to terpfeedback@umd.edu or @UMDarchives on Twitter. ONLINE lib.umd.edu/univarchives | BLOG umdarchives.wordpress.com | FACEBOOK University of Maryland University Archives

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BONES PHOTOS BY JOHN T. CONSOLI; GYPSY QUEEN PHOTO COURTESY OF MONTGOMERY COUNT Y HISTORICAL SOCIET Y; PERSHING RIFLE SOCIET Y PHOTO COURTESY OF TERRAPIN YEARBOOK

ALUMNI PROFILE / MATIAS DUARTE ’96

IF YOU’RE NOT TRIPPING UP WHEN TAPPING ON YOUR PHONE or feeling confused when clicking

on your screen, maybe you should thank Matias Duarte ’96. “I want to unlock the potential of the computer to be a completely adaptive tool that gives people superpowers,” says the Google vice president, who oversees all its design initiatives. “It’s an extension of your potential as a person, a tool to enhance your thinking.” In 2014 he created Material Design, a design language rooted in cognitive science, to streamline billions of users’ experiences across Google’s myriad of platforms, including mail, search and photos. In addition to providing color and typographical guidelines, its goal is to mimic objects’ realworld behavior on a screen. As a result, the brain doesn’t have to slow down to process illogical functions, whether windows disappearing from one corner of a screen and reappearing elsewhere, or a photo making a jerky transition to a detailed view. Five years ago, nobody would have put Google, co-founded by Sergey Brin ’93, at the top of any list for design prowess. But today, more than a million apps have adopted Duarte’s principles. “Google has really stepped up its design game, and it shows,” designer Sacha Greif, creator of Telescope and Sidebar, said in VentureBeat, which covers technology news. “Instead of trying to impose a strict visual aesthetic, Google defined a set of principles that leave more freedom to individual designers, while still pushing their numerous apps in the same consistent direction.” Born in Chile but raised primarily in the D.C. suburbs, Duarte was in elementary school when he got his first computer: an Atari 400 his dad bought from someone’s garage. That spurred his dual passions for art and computing, and at UMD he earned a computer science degree while doing oil paintings in his days outside the lab. Video games were a natural intersection of those interests. Inspired by their favorites, including the original Doom, he and a few UMD friends created their own company. Despite a highly competitive environment, they managed to secure contracts with PlayStation, Sega and Atari and got enough work to stick with it a few years after graduation. By that time, Duarte had moved out to California, where he worked on developing operating systems for the nascent mobile market, then early smartphones like the Danger HipTop (better known as the Sidekick) and the Helio Ocean before shifting to more established companies like Palm. In 2010, he came to Google to design for Android before advancing to his current role. One of his favorite accomplishments is the surprising success of the Sidekick in the deaf community, which even developed an American Sign Language sign for it. “That’s what I look for, a sense of having impact on people’s lives,” he says. “Not because you’ve sold a lot, but because it’s changed what they can do.”— KS

PHOTO COURTESY OF MATIAS DUARTE

Streamlined Design Alum Combines Passions for Art, Tech as Google VP

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ALUMNI PROFILE / JEFF KRULIK ’83

Still Rocking 30 Years Later, Viral Music Documentary Lives on at UMD jeff krulik ’83 and his friend, john heyn, had no grand designs when they rolled up to the Capital Centre with bulky camera equipment on May 31, 1986. The aspiring filmmakers simply thought it would be fun to capture the scene before a Judas Priest concert. The pair’s ensuing film—a 16-minute reel of drinking, shouting, bad hair and fashion crimes called “Heavy Metal Parking Lot”—went on to become an underground classic and one of the most heralded music documentaries of all time. It’s now part of a exhibition through May 2017 at umd’s Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library called “‘Heavy Metal Parking Lot’: The 30-year Journey of a Cult Film Sensation.” “It was kind of magic,” says Krulik (pictured at left, wearing white, with Heyn). “We just got great stuff.” Krulik always had an interest in music and entertainment, working for wmuc and helping to promote shows at the Stamp. After graduating, he started selling cable door-to-door and worked his way up to public access director at a MetroVision Cable studio in Capitol Heights. “The one great thing,” he says, “is no matter what, I had access to the equipment.” After meeting Heyn while researching old movie theaters in D.C., the pair started collaborating and got together for the spring night that

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CLASS NOTES would unknowingly define their careers. Heyn says he had been to heavy metal shows at a Baltimore nightclub and thought they might find the same level of “craziness” at the Capital Centre. “The idea was pretty simply formed and not that deep,” he says. “There was no clear path to creating a cult film.” They didn’t even bother licensing the Judas Priest music they used, and the fact that it was on video rather than film limited the documentary’s showing potential to small art venues. But the dawn of the videotape era made its success possible, as copies were passed around the D.C. area. “It’s this viral video before the term even existed,” Krulik says. Mike Heath, a friend who attended umd, is credited as the film’s “Johnny Appleseed” because he took a few copies along when he moved to California in 1992. The film had stuck with him through a mixture of “astonishment and bemusement and maybe a little schadenfreude,” he says. “You got to hand it to Jeff and John for going in there and coming out with this gem of a film,” Heath says. “A roughed-up, scuzzy gem, but a gem the same.” “Heavy Metal Parking Lot” eventually wound up in Mondo Video a Go Go in Los Angeles, an influential rental store, and Hollywood royalty like budding director Sofia Coppola sang its praises. It also became a mainstay on Nirvana’s tour bus. Besides donating material related to “Heavy Metal Parking Lot,” Krulik gave a career’s worth of ephemera to umd last year, from decades-old tourism brochures and county fair programs to film festival T-shirts and back issues of comic and punk magazines.

He has spent a lifetime capturing the strange but true, from the story of a Jewish World War II veteran who wound up with one of Hitler’s top hats to the people behind “Lancelot Link: Secret Chimp,” a Saturday morning kids’ show spoofing spy tales with real chimpanzees. “Heavy Metal Parking Lot,” however, is undoubtedly the main attraction. Laura Schnitker, a umd archivist who helped obtain the collection, says it provides insight into music fandom, car enthusiasts and how a place like the Capital Centre, a since-demolished indoor arena in nearby Landover, operated as a subculture’s gathering place before there were chat rooms and message boards. “These people aren’t all that strange,” she says. “They follow their bliss and passions, and they do it unapologetically.” In 2014, Rolling Stone named it one of the 40 Greatest Rock Documentaries, along with legendary films like “Gimme Shelter,” “The Last Waltz” and “Woodstock.” “These kids may occasionally be inarticulate, sexist and obnoxious, but their innocent quest for rock and roll kicks is unfiltered youth personified,” the magazine wrote. Krulik believes that’s the key to the documentary’s longevity. “You were either at that concert or you sat next to someone in homeroom who was at that concert,” he says.—lf

HEYN/KRULIK PHOTO BY MICHAEL EDWARDS; MATERIALS COURTESY OF JEFF KRULIK COLLECTION, UMD SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

Submit your class notes and read many more at terp.umd.edu.

CHANAN WEISSMAN ’06 was named the White House’s liaison to the Jewish community, becoming the first Modern Orthodox Jew to assume that position for a Democratic administration. He most recently served as a spokesman for the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.

LESLIE FISHBONE PH.D. ’72 (pictured at left) celebrated his 70th birthday with a trek to the rim of the summit crater (18,885 feet up!) of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. He’s mostly retired from a career in nuclear material safeguards.

Retired Army Col. MANUEL F. SIVERIO SR. ’50 received the Congressional Gold Medal in April as a veteran of the all-Puerto Rican 65th Infantry Regiment, known as the Borinqueneers. They fought in World Wars I and II and the Korean War, most notably at the Battle of Choisin Reservoir alongside U.S. Marines.

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CAMPUS LIFE

Changes in Opportunity Transgender Students Find Expanded Care Options at Health Center born a female, Louie Dukinfield ’19 knew by seventh grade he wanted his breasts removed. In high school, he wore men’s clothes and asked his parents and friends in his rural Virginia town to stop using his birth name. Yet it wasn’t until move-in day last fall at umd, when he saw the “Louie” nameplate in front of his room in Centreville Hall, that he realized, “I’m starting over.” Back then, he figured he’d have to wait years before getting testosterone injections as another step in his transition. Then he attended Queer Camp at umd, where he met a transgender graduate student who’d been undergoing hormone therapy and learned the University Health Center (uhc) was offering it. “I was like, why aren’t I doing this right now? Why am I waiting? Why am I purposely putting myself through being unhappy?” By January of this year, Dukinfield had completed all the mental-health, clinical and education requirements at the uhc to start his weekly treatments. The uhc’s expanded commitment to meet the health-care needs of the trans community won the attention of the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, which named the center a 2016 Leader in lgbt Healthcare Equality. Maryland and the University of California, Berkeley were the only two college health centers recognized on the annual index. It’s one part of the university’s overall efforts to be more welcoming to transgender students, particularly amid a national debate, centered on bathroom access, over the civil rights of transgender people. In the past several years, umd began offering genderinclusive housing to undergraduates who feel uncomfortable rooming with a student sharing their birth sex, and designating and promoting gender-inclusive bathrooms across campus. This fall, the University Senate will consider a bill to ease the process allowing students to use something other than their legal names on class rosters and IDs and in directories. Since 2011, when the university added gender identity and expression to its nondiscrimination policy, it’s been recognized every year on Campus Pride’s “Top 25 lgbtq-Friendly Colleges & Universities” list. “This is a really great place for queer students to come,” says Luke Jensen, longtime director of umd’s lgbt Equity Center. For transgender students, “we need to be constantly thinking

PHOTO BY JOHN T. CONSOLI

about what more we can do, especially because this is an area of growing awareness in our society.” Although the university doesn’t track the number of transgender students, umd’s Trans U student group has 121 Facebook members, and the Department of Residential Life reserves about 1 percent of its 9,450 beds as gender-inclusive, in which students regardless of sex, gender or gender identity share a room with a private bathroom. (Dukinfield, for example, lives with a student who identifies as non-binary, an umbrella term meaning neither, both or outside male or female.) The Health Center, meanwhile, has seen the number of students undergoing hormone therapy jump from two or three a few years ago to about 15 in Spring 2016, says Family Nurse Practitioner Penny Jacobs. umd had been helping students maintain their regimens since 2011; the university’s student insurance provider, ship, began covering new treatments three years later. The Health Center expanded staff training to provide a team-based approach, so students taking this step work with a mental health provider, clinical health provider and health education provider. “For many people, transition is a major life event. My goal is to support them in this process so they are most adequately prepared and have the most opportunities for success. Sometimes that’s addressing issues of concern outside the Health Center, like when a conversation with your parents didn’t go as well as you hoped or your roommate is bullying you,” says Jenna Beckwith Messman, the sexual health programs coordinator in the uhc. “As long as you’re on campus, we want to make sure you’re connected with someone, and you’re not in this alone.” Dukinfield, a psychology major who’s in College Park Scholars, had his “top surgery” over winter break, accompanied by his mom. (“I was going with or without her,” he says.) The uhc staff allows him to take half-doses of testosterone weekly, rather than give himself a full injection every two weeks. That helps regulate Dukinfield’s emotions and reduce the exhaustion that he worried would overwhelm him after a full-size shot. He doesn’t flinch at the thought of facing that for the rest of his life. He’s just grateful umd gave him the chance to start. “They made it so much easier of a process than anything that I’d read about or anything that I’d expected,” he says.–lb

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MASTERPPIECE

Sounds for Silence Students Create New Music for Silent Films

WILLIAM KENLON ADMITS THAT the first time he watched “Chip the Wooden Man in ‘Candyland,’” he felt fear. It wasn’t due to the content of the 1920s silent film, a surreal, 3.5-minute, stop-motion puppet tale of the titular Chip and his flying horse on a quest (with the assistance of a fairy and elf) to replace a distraught girl’s dropped candy. It’s what was missing—music accompaniment—and the fact that he had been tasked to write it. “I wouldn’t have chosen to write a piece about a wooden cowboy,” says Kenlon, a UMD doctoral student in music composition. “What am I going to write that makes sense?” The finished product, a jaunty tune for a woodwind quintet, is part of Music and Film at the University of Maryland, a program that gives students a chance to arrange and write music for long-lost silent films. Now, with a new partnership with the Library of Congress, the students’ work will be preserved for posterity on the archive’s website. The program was founded two years ago by music Professor Robert DiLutis and his wife, Pat Doyen, a film archivist, who saw an opportunity to reinvigorate moribund films with the creative power of college students. Lots of material was filmed 100 years ago,

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says DiLutis, from chemical reactions to whimsical animations. But many scores for short movies have gone missing over time, and plenty more were just generic directions for theater piano players, calling for “sad” or “happy” music. “We really look forward to hearing what the students come up with. It is amazing to see the creativity,” he says. “Most of what silent films do right now is sit on shelves.” Students have performed their compositions with the movies before packed houses at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center. DiLutis says the program encourages an entrepreneurial spirit in music students who could find careers in less typical avenues, like composing soundtracks for video games. “This is a totally different experience for them,” he says. Kenlon found he had to operate within the constraints of a film—its time restrictions and imagery— rather than follow the flows of his own imagination. He says the writing process involved breaking down the action, matching instruments to characters and brainstorming melodies that complemented the narrative’s transitions. “It was almost an athletic challenge,” he says. “It was nice to dip my toes in with this.”–LF

A Century of UMD Women T H E RU L E S Regulations for women governed everything from typewriter usage (banned after 7:30 p.m., except for between 10 and 10:30), to specific timeframes for male callers, to smoking (prohibited, even off-campus). On the other hand, “as far as I know, there was never a curfew for male students,” Turkos says. Those who strayed could be “campused”—confined to their rooms except for classes and meals—or suspended or expelled. Vivian Simpson, for example, was thrown out in 1924 for not only starting a sorority without permission and allegedly leaking scandalous information about administrators to The Washington Post, but also wearing a kimono with her hair loose in front of men, using an electric iron in the dorms and being “insolent and intolerant.”

T H E DE A N OF WOM E N Adele H. Stamp was appointed the first dean of women in 1922. “She had a dramatic, long-term impact,” Turkos says. “She looked at those young women as her children and really was totally consumed by their welfare.” Though she was strict, frowning on open-toe shoes and “unrestrained courtship,” she also created traditions like May Day, which celebrated graduating seniors with elaborate costumes, songs and skits; founded the Women’s Senior Honor Society, which became Maryland’s chapter of Mortar Board; and organized the first Women’s Physical Education Club, establishing women’s athletics on campus. She retired in 1960, and the student union was named for her in 1983.

strict 7:30 p.m. weekday curfews, mandatory chaperones for fraternity parties and expectations of “ladylike” behavior greeted the first women to enroll full-time at umd a century ago this fall. It’s hard to picture living under such stifling rules now, as female students step out from their mixed-gender residence halls in sweats and wet hair. But those pioneers fought through paternalistic priorities to create a new era for the university. University Archivist Anne Turkos, who created an exhibition at McKeldin Library to celebrate this anniversary, takes us through those early years.–ks

THE EXTR ACURRICULARS Campus life wasn’t all tea service and sewing machine care. By 1926, women made up more than 20 percent of the student population of 1,139. They competed in tennis, basketball, track and riflery (which produced Olympian Irene Knox ’34), formed the first official sorority on campus and integrated organizations including the student newspaper— though it wasn’t until 1944 that Jackie Brophy became the first female editor-inchief of The Diamondback.

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AMONG

the

“The University of Maryland opens all its courses and departments to girls, but is laying stress on the development of work in home economics because it feels that is the particular field in which it can do most for the future of womanhood in the state.”—Early 1920s promotional mailing Women were steered primarily into teaching and the College of Home Economics, established in 1918. Areas of study included cookery, textiles, hygiene and home management. (Occasionally, men also took classes in the college; Muppets creator Jim Henson ’60 earned a degree in home economics.) The two earliest female graduates bucked the trend: Charlotte Vaux earned a two-year degree in agriculture in 1918, and Elizabeth Hook earned a four-year degree in entomology in 1920.

—President A.F. Woods to Dean of Women Adele H. Stamp, March 19, 1923 MOVIE STILLS COURTESY OF ROBERT DILUTIS; FILM REEL PHOTO BY JOHN T. CONSOLI; ILLUSTRATION COURTESY OF UNIVERSIT Y ARCHIVES; LETTERING BY HAILEY HWA SHIN

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DISHING ON DINING

1859

UMD STUDENTS THIS FALL are digesting the biggest change

in Dining Services in decades, with the introduction of “anytime dining.” All resident dining plans now provide unlimited access to the three dining halls—students can eat as often and as much as they like. Carryout has ended, taking an estimated 6.3 million disposable products out of the waste stream annually. Besides sustainability, another goal is to eliminate food insecurity, since under the old system, some students ran out of dining points before the semester ended. Joe Mullineaux ’95, senior associate director of Dining Services (and a 39-year employee!), says the new system provides more healthy options and variety, including madeto-order smoothies and at least seven flavor-infused waters, as well as a more community-like atmosphere. That got us thinking: What else in dining has changed over the years? Thanks to Mullineaux and colleague Bart Hipple, and Anne Turkos and Jason Speck in University Archives, we found out. And we almost choked on our Roy Rogers fried chicken from the Stamp.—LB

1960 Male students must wear a jacket and tie to Sunday dinner, which ends at noon and is the last meal served that day.

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1912

1924

Kitchen and pantries are known as “Charlie Dory’s resort,” named for the longtime chief cook—and the sauna-like heat. (Dory descendants have worked for Dining Services ever since.)

UMD begins producing its own ice cream.

Maryland Agricultural College opens. Students grow its produce outside what’s now the Rossborough Inn.

1901 Mess hall requirements include “gentlemanly manners.” Complaints about wait service must be made in writing through “proper military channels.”

1927

1932

1949

1950

1955

Students treated at the infirmary can have meals delivered from Dining Hall #1 (LeFrak Hall) for $1.

Wendell Arbuckle, known as “Dr. Ice Cream,” appointed professor in charge of dairy manufacturing.

Dining halls serve two entrees per meal, such as fried chicken and liver. Taking food from dining halls after 7 p.m. closure nets one week of work in dish room, or adjudication before student conduct panel.

Student Union opens, offering coffee, doughnuts and snacks via the “Terp Inn.”

1960s Rioting antiwar students overturn food delivery trucks, prompting escort of National Guardsmen.

1965 A state legislative subcommittee investigates student complaints about the food, staff and operation of the dining halls. In an interim report, the group acknowledged the issue wasn’t one it could “be deeply involved in.”

1967 Ill-fated Terrapin Cola introduced. One student describes it as “RC with garlic added.”

1974

1970

Students demand and get china and glassware replaced with Styrofoam, saying it’s cleaner.

1970s

Lowering of legal drinking age to 18 prompts boozy changes: Special dinners include five-cent glasses of beer, pumped from kegs in the dining halls. On Fridays, dining halls distribute ice and heavyduty trash bags to keep kegs cold at residence-hall parties. The Pub opens in the student union, able to tap 200 kegs at once and hold 2,000 students.

1978

1977

Salad bar offers iceberg lettuce, carrot and celery sticks, and three kinds of dressing. (Today, students can find at least 45 items there.)

1982 The Pub hosts wet T-shirt contests.

Terabac Room opens in the Cambridge dining hall, with live bands, musical theater and dancing. It has a dress code, candles and tablecloths and sells upscale beers like Heineken (for 85 cents) and food including quiche, crepes and fondue.

“Animal House” prompts surge of food fights. Fliers in dorms prompt students to wear raincoats to meals. Dining hall staffers complain about lengthy cleanups.

1993

2007

Renovation of Byrd Stadium, now Maryland Stadium, ends sales of concession from outdoor trailers without running water (and before then, from temporary shacks).

First rooftop garden grown on the Diner, to supplement herbs served in meals.

2010

2013

2014

Farmers Market opens in front of Cole Field House.

Green Tidings food truck starts serving gourmet, sustainable food at sites around campus. (Hazelnutcrusted vegan burger, anyone?)

Terp Farm in Upper Marlboro begins growing organic produce for use on campus. Dairy sales move from Turner Hall to the Stamp, with 24 rotating flavors (like VaniLoh Mango).

2015 Beer concessions start in Xfinity Center and Maryland Stadium. First kosher concession stand on U.S. university campus opens in Xfinity.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF UNIVERSIT Y ARCHIVES; 2007, 2013, 2014 PHOTOS BY JOHN T. CONSOLI; 2015 PHOTO COURTESY OF DANI KLEIN

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INNOVATION

Buried in Snow Researchers Hunt for Hidden Water in Greenland’s Vast Ice Expanse

UMD

ly nn montgomery ’16 had never even gone camping before last year, when she caught a helicopter to a barren glacier in Greenland to study the effects of global warming, coping all the while with the possibility of prowling polar bears and 15-foot snowfalls. “We’re out on the ice sheet about 18 days to finish everything we need to do,” the former atmospheric and oceanic sciences major says. “Doing that was a pretty big leap for me.” She was assisting Nicholas Schmerr, an assistant professor of geology studying Greenland’s “firn”—a thick layer of packed snow that coats ice sheets. The formation caught the attention of global climate watchers earlier this decade when Schmerr’s collaborators

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from several universities described new subsurface lakes known as “firn aquifers” in areas that large-scale melting hadn’t been seen before. “The consensus is that climate change is probably 100 percent responsible,” he says. Schmerr is using seismology to measure an aquifer’s shape. With Montgomery’s help, he extended strings of sensors across the ice, and then bashed a metal plate with a sledgehammer. The sensors picked up the vibrations and gave a partial view of what lies beneath, helping to answer some fundamental questions. “Does the water drain to the bed of the ice sheet, or is it finding another pathway through the ice that we’re not aware of, or is just being stored there—perhaps growing in volume each year?” says Schmerr, who returned to Greenland this summer for more experiments. Greenland’s ice is closely linked to climate and coastlines. While Schmerr says emptying the Greenland firn aquifer into the oceans would raise the global sea level by only a millimeter (at a time when it’s already rising 1.8 millimeters

a year), the entire island’s ice, if melted, could boost it by 7 meters. Though most scientists consider that highly unlikely anytime soon, a far more modest melt still could impact global climate if enough freshwater pours into the North Atlantic to affect ocean currents. The mechanisms that cause glacier ice to end up in the ocean are a major focus of another Greenland-focused Terp researcher, Derrick Lampkin, assistant professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences. Water movement through firn aquifers could be a key to understanding the flow of the glaciers, which are really giant rivers of ice, says Lampkin, who studied the phenomenon on site in 2015. Montgomery, meanwhile, plans to continue as a graduate student at Colorado, where Schmerr’s and Lampkin’s colleague on the Greenland study, Lora Koenig, is a researcher at the National Snow and Ice Data Center. “It was one of the most fantastic experiences of my life,” she says. “I’m definitely hoping to go back to Greenland.”–cc

GREENLAND PHOTOS COURTESY OF DERRICK LAMPKIN AND LYNN MONTGOMERY; GRIP BOOST PHOTO BY JOHN T. CONSOLI

Getting a Grip Alums Revive Gloves, Save Cash for Young Athletes

AS A HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL PLAYER , Matt

Furstenburg ’12 hoarded precious pairs of receiving gloves that hadn’t lost their tackiness—helpful for hauling in fingertip touchdown catches. “I didn’t want to wear out my game gloves during practice, so I didn’t wear them,” he says. It was far less of a problem after he became a tight end for the Terps football team, which budgets thousands of dollars a year just for gloves. But Furstenburg thought back to his earlier plight, wondering how to revive gloves that had stopped sticking but otherwise were in good shape—potentially saving young players the $25 or more that new gloves cost. He took his idea to the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship and hashed it out with Harry Geller, a local businessman with a knack for starting successful companies and one of the center’s entrepreneurs in residence. Geller liked the concept so much that he agreed to co-found Grip Boost LLC with Furstenburg. “We toyed around with how to solve it—a spray or a gel recoating—but neither of us are chemical engineers,” says Geller, “so we connected with Srinivasa Raghavan,” a professor of chemical and bioengineering and head of the Complex Fluids and Nanomaterials group. Two of Raghavan’s former students—Chanda Arya Ph.D. ’14 and Kevin Diehn M.S. ’14—became the scientific end of Grip Boost. They needed to develop a product tacky enough to help receivers snag balls, but not so sticky it violates football rules. And it had to dry almost instantly so players could get back into the game. After formulating scores of rub-on gels using strategically modified chitosan—a material derived from the shells of crab and other shellfish—they finally settled on one that Furstenburg knew would meet the needs of football receivers. Available online and increasingly in sporting goods stores, Grip Boost is gaining traction with young players and their coaches, Diehn says. “We went from selling 300 bottles in 2014 to selling 10,000 bottles in 2015,” with sales on track to exceed 30,000 in 2016, he says. The company recently introduced a version formulated especially to replace messy pine tar in baseball, and is considering versions for golf and other sports as well. Grip Boost is also looking at industrial uses for its technology, Geller says. “Sport was a natural place to start,” he says. “But our mission really is to be all things grip.”–CC

Comfort Zone Portable Device to Cool, Heat One Person at a Time IF YOU’VE SPENT THE SUMMER BUNDLED IN SWEATERS AND

a new device designed to cool and heat individuals—not an entire office— might be just what you, your company and the planet need. The “Roving Comforter” (RoCo) (shown at right without its case), is about 3 feet tall and set on a round, wheeled platform about a foot in diameter. It’s reminiscent of “Star Wars’” R2-D2, or more alarmingly, “Doctor Who’s” Daleks— though this little robot has only the best intentions. “We’re saving people money and saving the Earth at the same time,” says Research Associate Jan Muehlbauer. Heating, ventilation and air conditioning account for 13 percent of the energy consumed in the United States, prompting the U.S. Department of Energy early last year to challenge engineers nationwide to develop localized thermal management systems. A group in the UMD Center for Environmental Energy Engineering led by Professor Reinhard Radermacher honed in on a personal cooling and heating device. He, Muehlbauer, Professor Jelena Srebric, Assistant Research Professor Jiazhen Ling and graduate student Yilin Du M.S. ’16 found that concentrating the desired temperature around only individuals, rather than the room they’re in, would allow a building’s thermostat to be set several degrees higher or lower, saving up to 30 percent in energy costs. The RoCo’s air distribution system is based on computational fluid dynamic models—typically SLIPPERS AT WORK,

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used in the design of cars or rockets—to push air to targeted parts of the body, optimizing the temperature around a person in a way that a regular space heater can’t. In addition, the unit uses a method most often applied to computer CPUs to efficiently capture and remove heat generated through the cooling process. The team’s current prototype can run for about three hours before it requires recharging and heat dispersion; the goal is to get to four. Once the RoCo is synced to a Bluetooth bracelet, the robotic platform will be able to follow a person around, particularly in a warehouse or data center. (In offices and homes, the team imagines placing a unit in every room.) The UMD group estimates the RoCo will reach the market as soon as 2017 with a price of $250. In the meantime, Srebric and her team will test the prototype on users to see what type of technology they prefer to collect and maintain their personal data. (Options include incorporating a learning algorithm that remembers temperature preferences or installing devices to automatically pick up physiological changes such as heart rate.) She also wants to determine how individuals respond on a psychological level to temperature changes, so she can make the device as flexible and user-friendly as possible. “The whole idea is that you’re not immersed in this bulk environment that everyone else is in,” she says. “You’re getting personal attention to your needs.”–KS

PHOTO BY JOHN T. CONSOLI

NEWSDESK

LMAO! idiot

liar!!

UMD faculty share their expertise with the media:

paid troll

class clown

moron!!!

“Ideally, what the venture needs is a combination of the founders’ passion and the professional’s experience and savvy.”

LOLOLOL

%!@?$

ANIL GUPTA, BUSINESS, ON THE VALUE OF HIRING AN EXPERIENCED EXTERNAL CEO AT A GROWING STARTUP, AT QUARTZ.COM, MAY 16.

“When you’re strongly identified with a group, like a party, it can be more strongly motivating for you to win than for you to ensure the greater good.” LILLIANA MASON, GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS, ON WHY PEOPLE MIGHT VOTE FOR A CANDIDATE THEY DON’T LIKE, NEWSWEEK.COM, JUNE 1.

Show Comments Can an Algorithm Make Sense of Readers’ Reactions? WE’VE ALL READ A FASCINATING ARTICLE

only to stumble into a dark forest of off-topic, ALL-CAPS name-calling in the comment section. But UMD researchers are designing a system that uses computer learning to help editors quickly mine through hundreds or thousands of comments, pushing the most relevant and well-written to the top of the heap. Nick Diakopoulos, an assistant professor and head of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism’s Computational Journalism Lab, studies comment moderation at The New York Times, which employs 13 full-time comment editors. The system he’s developing, CommentIQ, aims to give lone editors at smaller publications the same level of oversight. ONLINE,

ILLUSTRATIONS BY STEFFANIE ESPAT

An algorithm does the initial read, quickly scoring comments on editor-set parameters like readability and the amount of personal experience reflected. Crucially, CommentIQ doesn’t make the final cut, but delivers a winnowed-down selection of relevant comments so a real person can highlight the best of the best. “It takes advantage of what computers are good at, and what people are good at,” says Diakopoulos, who’s also a member of the UMD Human-Computer Interaction Lab. “We’re interested in the sweet spot between automation and human judgment.” His collaborator, Niklas Elmqvist, an associate professor in the College of Information Studies with a joint appointment in the university’s Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), says publications have much to gain from civil, intelligent comment sections. “In an ideal world, people have a fruitful exchange of ideas, although in reality, that’s usually not what happens,” he says. “But if the comments become valued additions to the article, you build a community of commenters and engage readers.”—CC

“

Young people text a lot, but they’re not doing it at the expense of face-to-face contact. What I see that is more concerning is family members focusing on their phones and not sitting around the dinner table enjoying conversations.

”

LIANA SAYER, SOCIOLOGY, ON A NIELSEN STUDY FINDING MEDIA USE IS UP MORE THAN AN HOUR A DAY, WINSTON-SALEM (N.C.) JOURNAL, JULY 4.

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TERP: WHAT PUSHED YOU TO ETHICAL HACKING?

Summers: When I was 13, I got into an argument online with a hacker. He sent me a file that turned out to be a virus, and it was really, really cool. It showed me a movie on the left side of my screen, while on the right it was literally deleting every file on the computer. That was a pivotal moment in my life. I never wanted it to happen to my mom or my aunt or my grandma. I realized I needed to learn to create viruses myself so I could understand how to stop them. TERP: SO IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT MAKING MISCHIEF? SUMMERS: For many of us, hacking

is about protecting people. It’s what motivated me, starting at home and then taking that to the Department of Defense, where I worked in cybersecurity. Hackers have been described as “the immune system of the internet,” which I think is accurate. When a new technology comes out, it’s the hackers that break it apart and find out everything that’s wrong with it or vulnerable about it, so it can be fixed before harm can spread. TERP: HOW DO WE ENCOURAGE MORE

FACULTY Q&A / TIMOTHY C. SUMMERS

ETHICAL HACKING, AND LESS OF THE OTHER KIND?

In Defense of Hacking WHAT IF INSTEAD OF BEING VILLAINS,

hackers are the heroes of the cyber underworld? That’s the position of Timothy Summers, director of innovation, entrepreneurship and engagement in UMD’s College of Information Studies. A self-taught hacker who was breaking into computer systems before he could drive, Summers today studies hackers’ cognitive psychology and touts “ethical hacking” as a way to improve society. The challenge for the United States, he tells Terp, is to ensure a steady supply of computer whizzes with a passion to protect.

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SUMMERS: In terms of ethical hacking,

TERP: HOW DID YOU START GOING BEYOND THE BASICS WITH COMPUTERS? SUMMERS: I’d gotten a game from a

computer store, and there was a glitch that wouldn’t let you boot back into Windows. I had to call tech support and stay on the phone all night—back in the days when you paid for long-distance by the minute—typing in codes and scripts to fix it. Doing that was a revelation to me. (The next big thing for me was learning about phone phreaking, where you’re hacking phone lines to make long-distance calls.)

there’s actually a huge lack of qualified people. Many of our adversaries actually have a lot more able hackers than we do. One of the biggest challenges at the moment is training. Unfortunately, for people with necessary skills, Silicon Valley is much more attractive than the government. So the government is doing a lot of work to develop cyber talent [including through UMD’s Maryland Cybersecurity Center and Advanced Cybersecurity Experience for Students program], my research focuses on the cognition necessary for effective hacking, and we basically have to keep encouraging people to enter this field.—CC

PHOTO COURTESY OF ISTOCK .COM; SUMMERS PHOTO BY JOHN T. CONSOLI

Living History Professor Helps Renew Shakespeare’s Globe for most historians, the opportunities for live experiments are rare, but Franklin Hildy, director of graduate studies in the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, has been part of one for more than three decades. The expert in theater history (left) helped design and build, and continues to refine, the reconstructed Globe Theatre on the banks of the River Thames in London. Since 1984, he has been director of the Shakespeare Globe Center (usa) Research Archive, and last year, he became the only American recognized as a Globe senior research fellow for his contributions to knowledge of Shakespearean theater. The Globe has come a long way, he says, since American actor, director and producer Sam Wanamaker proposed recreating the theater where the Bard’s plays were first performed more than 400 years ago. Wanamaker, who started the project in 1970 and died before it was complete, spearheaded decades of researching and fundraising while battling skeptics who thought it would be nothing but a glorified theme park. Now, it’s one of the most successful theaters in England, attracting nearly a half million people last year. “It gives you a chance to take all this research you do and apply it,” Hildy says. “We’ve learned enormous amounts from that project.” Rebuilding the Globe—just a few hundred yards from its original location, with a thatched roof, plaster walls and yard open to the sky—was an effort based on best guesses, as its measurements and appearance had to be woven from

contemporary sketches, written accounts and even part of Shakespeare’s “Henry V.” Since it opened in 1997, Hildy says, further scholarship has shown that the London Globe was built too big, and a lower gallery doesn’t have correct angles and causes some acoustic problems. These are the sorts of issues addressed by Hildy and other members of the Architectural Advisory Group, which provides ongoing consultation to the trustees of the theater complex. The biggest revelation, however, has been in terms of audience dynamics. The historic design of the building calls for nearly half of its 1,500 audience members to stand in the yard, a section not covered by a roof. Initially, modern patrons tried to sit in the yard area around three sides of the stage, instead of standing like their forebears. “If you let them do that, the building didn’t work,” Hildy says. “You could feel the energy drain out of this dynamic structure when the audience sat.” To prevent this, the theater staff used to spray the area with water before the audience came in. Now, everyone knows it is a standing area. Having completed the design for the indoor Sam Wanamaker playhouse (based on 17th-century plans), the Architectural Advisory Group, of which Hildy is the only active American member, will return to the issue of how to decorate the inside of Shakespeare’s Globe, a project that was not completed when it opened. Although there is no definitive blueprint to follow, he says the challenge is to constantly improve knowledge of these theaters. “Sometimes you do not get it right, but you learn from that,” Hildy says. “And this theater history project is inspiring a new generation of people to love Shakespeare.”–lf

GLOBE PHOTO BY PHOTO FUSION; ILLUSTRATION COURTESY OF FOLGER SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY

CENTERPIECE

For more information, visit pianosforplay.com.

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THE KEYS TO COMMUNITY HOW ABOUT SOME “CHOPSTICKS” OR CHOPIN between classes? A group of students last semester turned Hornbake Plaza, the Washington Quad and McKeldin Mall into temporary outdoor performance spaces through a whimsical project called Pianos for Play. Inspired by efforts in Montreal and New York City, computer science major Nachmi Kott ’17 recruited friends to collect old pianos around the D.C. area. Student artists painted them, then volunteers rolled the five colorful pieces to locations around campus in early April (but left a tarp behind, for when rain threatened). For the next several weeks, Kott says, “Every time I went to a piano, it was being played. I’d just literally watch people meet each other and play together for the first time.” Connecting people at UMD was his goal, and he hopes to do it again next spring—depending on how many bargain-priced pianos he can procure.

Julian L. Kopelove ’18 performs on Hornbake Plaza before Jacqueline Maranville ’16 and David Montier ’18.

PHOTO BY JOHN T. CONSOLI

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DEC A DE S A F TER C ONTROV ERSI A L CL A IMS, A DIS C OV ERY C A S T S NE W LIGHT ON A PIONEERING UMD PH YSICIS T B Y C HR I S C A R RO L L

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Joseph Weber examines the enclosure for his device designed to measure gravitational waves on the moon that was launched with the 1972 Apollo 17 mission.

ORE THAN A BILLION YEARS AGO, A PAIR OF BL ACK HOLES—COLL APSED STARS WITH GRAVITY STRONG ENOUGH TO ENSNARE LIGHT AND BEND TIME— SPIRALED TOGETHER AND VIOLENTLY MERGED. LIKE WAVES FROM A ROCK THROWN INTO A L AKE, THE TITANIC COLLISION CAUSED “RIPPLES” IN THE FABRIC OF THE UNIVERSE THAT RADIATED OUT WARD. L AST FALL, JUST AS THE $620 MILLION L ASER INTERFEROMETER GRAVITATIONAL-WAVE OBSERVATORY (LIGO) WAS SWITCHED BACK ON AFTER A MA JOR UPGRADE, ONE OF THEM REACHED EARTH. At a February press conference, leaders of the 1,000-member LIGO team, which includes several University of Maryland researchers, announced the first-ever detection of gravitational waves, promising a new way to observe events in space. In blogs and on newscasts and front pages around the world, it was hailed as one of the greatest discoveries of recent decades. The news had a familiar ring. Nearly 50 years earlier, a lone UMD professor generated similar fanfare with the same revelation. In 1969, Joseph Weber, one of the 20th century’s most brilliant and idiosyncratic physicists, announced that two instruments he’d built—one in a small cinderblock building hidden in the woods at the University Golf Course, the other at Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago—had simultaneously registered a gravitational wave. This apparent verification of Einstein’s theory of general relativity—the great physicist himself considered gravity waves too weak to observe—gained Weber widespread fame and made him a leader of an area of physics previously considered impossible to pursue. Early on, Weber had relished having an extreme frontier of science nearly to himself. But now physicists around the world, entranced by his findings, were dropping other projects to follow him into the field he’d created at UMD .

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PHOTOS COURTESY OF UNIVERSIT Y ARCHIVES; LETTERING BY HAILEY HWA SHIN

THE YANKEE Yonah ben Yakov Weber was born in Paterson, N.J., in 1919, the youngest of four children of working-class parents who had emigrated from present-day Lithuania. He became “Joe” when his mother enrolled him in public school. Joe Weber became even more Americanized—earning the nickname “Yankee” from his family—after he was hit by a bus at age 5 and lost the ability to talk. When he regained it, his Yiddish-influenced accent had been replaced by the middle-American diction of his speech therapist, says Virginia Trimble, a prominent astronomer whom Weber married in 1972 after the death of his first wife. Trimble collected stories of Weber’s early life in an unpublished manuscript. Weber filled dozens of thick logbooks with calculations, ideas and diagrams. UMD has preserved them, along with much of his experimental data.

Here’s the catch: Weber was almost certainly wrong about what his instruments recorded. For years, other researchers unsuccessfully hunted for gravitational waves, and physicists now dismiss his findings as data analysis errors. Weber fought an increasingly futile public battle to defend his status as discoverer of gravitational waves until his death in 2000. Yet the door his pioneering research had opened onto the mysteries of the universe would remain open. “If Weber were alive today, he would share the Nobel Prize,” says Ho Jung Paik, a research scientist and professor emeritus who worked closely with Weber. “We all recognize his contribution. He started the whole business.”

The most violent forces in existence, like the collision of black holes (upper right), create gravitational waves. As the waves radiate outward, they compress and stretch matter on subatomic scale (the effect on the Earth, right, is magnified for effect) and even warp spacetime, the very fabric of our universe.

WHAT ARE GRAVITATIONAL WAVES?

Weber learned the joys of spinning dials and fine-tuning instrumentation early, building his first amateur radio set by age 10 and later accepting a job at a radio store. After high school, he won a coveted spot at the U.S. Naval Academy. There, Trimble wrote, the laser-focused Weber “stood first in his class in ‘thermodynamics, differential calculus, and other subjects of very little interest to the Navy,’ but nearly anchor in what is called ‘aptitude for the service’ (meaning, roughly, social graces).” Social awkwardness didn’t stop Weber from becoming an officer on the aircraft carrier USS Lexington, on which he sailed out of Pearl Harbor two days before the Japanese attack on Dec. 7, 1941. During the Battle of the Coral Sea in 1942, he watched from a rescue boat as the burning ship sank into the darkened ocean. He told a Naval Academy interviewer: “When last seen by me, she was incandescent.” Weber spent the insurance payment for property lost on the Lexington on an engagement ring for his high school sweetheart, physicist Anita Straus, whom he married that year. He took command of a speedy submarine chaser (he souped up the radar to improve detection of German boats) and helped guide the initial landing of the invasion of Sicily ashore in 1943. After the war, with a growing reputation as a technical whiz, he ran the Navy’s electronic countermeasures section. Weber left the service in 1948 at the rank of lieutenant commander.

In his UMD lab, Weber (at left, second from left) and colleagues work on gravitational wave detection equipment in December 1971. Weber teaches a physics class (right) in 1969, the year he published his seminal paper.

MARY L AND AND MASERS In 1948, UMD administrators offered the promising young engineer a full professorship in electrical engineering. It came with the proviso that he earn a Ph.D.—in something— and soon. With a dawning interest in physics, Weber enrolled at Catholic University of America and researched microwave spectroscopy. He made his first major scientific breakthrough in 1951 when he worked out the idea for the maser, a device to amplify microwaves that was the forerunner of the laser. He presented the first scientific paper about the device at a conference in 1952, but didn’t build one. The three other scientists who later built prototypes—at least one of them first studied Weber’s paper—received the 1964 Nobel Prize in physics. Weber himself got little credit and was deeply stung by the machinations of scientific renown, several friends and colleagues say. By then, however, Weber had already moved in another direction. Years later, he told Darrell Gretz, an engineer who helped him construct gravitational detectors and monitor tests, that he’d wanted to focus on “a field so difficult that no one would compete with me.” Late-night reading—one of his four young sons was chronically sleepless and frequently kept him up—had sparked a growing interest in Einstein’s gravitational theory, known as general relativity. In 1955–56, he took a sabbatical to study relativity with the leader in the field, Princeton University theoretical physicist John A. Wheeler. With Wheeler’s encouragement, Weber resolved to search directly for gravitational waves. It was a long-shot, high-reward gambit. “Through late 1957, all of 1958, and early 1959, Weber struggled to invent every scheme he could for detecting gravitational waves,” physicist Kip Thorne, co-founder of the LIGO project and a Weber admirer, wrote in his book, “Black Holes and Time Warps.” “This was a pen, paper and brainpower exercise, not experimental. He filled four 300page notebooks with ideas, possible detector designs, and calculations of the expected performance of each design. One idea after another he cast aside as not promising.”

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WEBER BARS By 1959, the 40-year-old Weber had chosen a design using massive aluminum bars—in effect, cylindrical 3,000-pound bells that he believed gravitational waves would “ring” by minutely compressing, then stretching them. Weber faced overwhelming early challenges, says Jean-Paul Richard, a UMD professor emeritus of physics who came from France in 1965 to work with him. At a time when many people doubted the existence of black holes and other sources of gravitational waves, Weber had to make educated guesses about the frequency of the waves created by such sources, and size his bars to match. He came very close, as later study showed. “When he decided to build his device, there was no knowledge about gravitational waves or how you should start searching for them,” Richard says. “I’ve always been amazed at how original and ingenious his work was.” The sensors Weber devised to measure changes in the bar, based on crystals that generate electricity when pushed and pulled, had to be unprecedentedly sensitive, Richard says. “You’re measuring displacements much smaller than the diameter of an atom.” Weber relentlessly labored over the bars for a decade— 12-hour days were commonplace, Gretz says—and shook the scientific world when he announced he’d verified Einstein’s prediction of gravitational waves in the real world. Even before the 1969 publication of his paper “Evidence for the Discovery of Gravitational Radiation,” Weber’s growing renown inspired scores of physicists to devote themselves to studying gravitational waves. Among those drawn to UMD was Charles Misner, a professor emeritus of physics who helped shape modern relativity research and co-authored the landmark book “Gravitation.” Students loved his energy as well. Physicist David G. Blair encountered him at a gravitation seminar at Louisiana State University. As Blair describes in his book “Detection

of Gravitational Waves,” a classroom of postdocs was captivated by the “wiry and agile” Weber—a lifelong runner— darting back and forth in front of a chalkboard and enlivening complex theory with wry asides on academia and funding agencies. “Never before and never since has mathematics on the blackboard brought tears of laughter to my eyes,” Blair wrote of the 1974 seminar.

FLEE TING ACCL AIM That year marked a turning point for Weber. Since his 1969 discovery, groups worldwide had been constructing bar detectors, but none was confirming the gravitational waves Weber reported seeing frequently. Scientific discord came to a head at a Massachusetts Institute of Technology gravitation conference. Richard Garwin, a widely respected physicist who played a key role in developing the first hydrogen bomb, had built a bar detector at IBM but found nothing. He now launched into a harsh critique based on fundamental errors in Weber’s data analysis. Weber’s heated response was perhaps more characteristic of a former warship captain than of a placid academic. As tension mounted, according to multiple published accounts, the conference chair, stricken by polio as a child, held his cane out to separate them. Weber revised his data analysis practices and remained a respected scientist, particularly among those who had worked with him and seen firsthand his questing scientific spirit and seemingly limitless drive. But his reputation suffered as he refused to rethink his claims, instead focusing on revising earlier calculations to prove his points. Freeman Dyson, a renowned physicist with whom Weber bonded during sabbaticals at Princeton, regretted earlier advice to his friend to stick by his findings, and now implored him to back down. “A great man is not afraid to admit publicly that he has made a mistake and has changed his mind,” Dyson wrote in a letter, quoted in the book “Gravity’s Shadow” by sociologist Harry Collins. “If you do this, your enemies will rejoice but your friends will rejoice even more. You will save yourself as a scientist.” Paik, who’d come to UMD from Stanford to improve Weber’s bar detectors with cryogenic cooling, asked his colleague to stop arguing and let the mechanisms of science decide. “Science is objective. You don’t have to continue to shout you found gravity waves,” Paik remembers telling him. But Weber had far less trust in those mechanisms than in the instruments he continually refined. In the late 1980s, the National Science Foundation stopped funding his research. Weber also faced mandatory retirement at age 70 from UMD and the University of California-Irvine, where Trimble was a professor and where he’d worked part of each year as a visiting professor since their marriage. Elsewhere, the LIGO project was under way, using a different and potentially more sensitive method called laser interferometry, which detects gravitational waves through their effect on laser beams.

To Weber’s chagrin, LIGO was attracting far more government funding than his projects ever had. “We’re No. 1 in the field, but I haven’t gotten funding since 1987,” he lamented in a Baltimore Sun article headlined “Pioneer researcher into gravity waves now a pariah in field.” Now working alone as a research professor, Weber continued to fund his detectors out of his own pocket, reporting daily to his lab in the woods. Although exceptionally nimble for his age (Trimble reports he could climb an Olympic rope well into his sixties) he took a bad fall in an ice storm navigating the hilly gravel road to the building. His broken bones didn’t heal correctly, and he suffered a recurrence of lymphoma during his recuperation. He died on Sept. 30, 2000. Why did he persevere? Even though scientific detractors demanded “a pound of my flesh,” he told Thorne in a recorded interview (quoted in physicist Janna Levin’s book “Black Hole Blues”) that during the solitary hours in his remote laboratory perfecting instruments and studying data, he found fulfillment. “If you do science, the principal reason to do it is because you enjoy it,” he said. “And I enjoy it.”

A LEGACY RECONSIDERED Ironically, Weber himself helped pioneer the basic concept behind LIGO, which succeeded where his instruments had failed. Colleague Jean-Paul Richard says he saw the idea outlined in the margins of one of Weber’s papers from long before LIGO began. At the February press conference in Washington, D.C., where widow Virginia Trimble sat in a place of honor in the front row, Thorne and others made sure to credit Weber as a key early contributor. Today, few if any would deny Weber is the rightful father of gravitational wave research, or that his relentless work opened the door to viewing the workings of the universe in a whole new way—not with light or other electromagnetic waves that can be halted by veils of cosmic dust, but with gravity, which stops at nothing. TERP

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CHANGE IN HER POCKET Alum Doles Out No-Nonsense Personal Finance Tips as Syndicated Columnist By Karen Shih ’09

i c h e l l e s i n g l e t a r y ’84 once froze the half-eaten sheet cake from her husband’s birthday, preserving the part in the middle with her husband and son’s shared name. Then she served the shrunken version a month later— at her 4-year-old son’s party. She’s not embarrassed about that. Or about delving deep into her fiance’s finances before they got married. Or re-wrapping toys from the bottom of the toy bin for her young kids at Christmas. Why should she be? Singletary spent the first four years of her life hungry and neglected by her birth parents, before being taken in by her grandmother, a nurse’s assistant who never made more than $13,000 a year. There, she had exactly what she needed and not much more—not an extra pair of sneakers from the grocery store bin for school or another serving of fried chicken and pinto beans at dinnertime. “Frugality is a way to keep control,” she says. “Financial security means you have choices. Things don’t happen to you. If your car breaks down, it’s not a catastrophe.” That’s the message she sends as the syndicated columnist of “The Color of Money” at The Washington Post; through her three books, radio interviews and television appearances, including her own cable show; and in her work in the community with husband Kevin McIntyre ’84 through their Prosperity Partners financial ministry program. Her no-nonsense, Bible-inspired advice and strong opinions on personal finance

include a hatred of debt, an emphasis on giving and an insistence that married couples share everything financially. Some call her approach simplistic and too uncompromising—but the thousands she’s helped say she changed their lives. “Personal finance is rocket science these days,” Singletary says, citing retirement accounts, life insurance, college funds, identity theft and credit card fraud. “I understand why people make bad financial decisions.”

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THE DRILL SERGEANT AND GUARDIAN ANGEL

FROM BAGGED LUNCH TO BAGS OF MAIL

ven a casual Singletary fan knows all about “Big Mama,” her late grandmother, who always paid her bills early and retired with her mortgage paid off. She brought stability to Singletary and her four siblings, aged 1 to 8 at the time she took them in. At her immaculate West Baltimore rowhouse, they got regular meals, school supplies and clothes. While “kids would tease us about the stuff we had,” she says, recalling a jingle about $1.99 “fish head” sneakers people used to sing at her, “We knew it was tight for her. You didn’t complain… and she never apologized for it.” Her grandmother refused nearly all welfare, instead carefully budgeting to cover the children’s needs. The only exception was medical aid to treat their serious ailments, including asthma, epilepsy and Singletary’s juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. (It forced Singletary out of school for three years, during which she took classes over the phone. Her condition improved significantly as she got older.) But Big Mama’s distrust of government assistance brought Singletary to tears when she was accepted to the University of Maryland and needed help paying for college. “I am not sharing my information with these people,” her grandmother said, refusing to fill out the forms. “They’ll come take my house.” For Singletary, college was an opportunity to not only escape poverty but also eventually help her family financially. Luckily, The Baltimore Sun newspapers introduced a minority scholarship her senior year in high school that not only covered tuition, room and board and books, but also included four paid summer internships and a job after graduation. At the insistence of her grandmother, Singletary set out alone at 6 a.m. for her 10 a.m. interview to catch a bus to the newspaper office downtown. Even after waiting in the lobby for nearly four hours, she charmed the editors with tales of growing up with Big Mama’s endless rules. “They were just rolling with laughter,” she says. “Years later, one of the editors on the committee said to me, ‘You were so confident, coming from so little.’”

ingletary easily admits she lived at umd like an “80-year-old Depression-era woman,” with a 10 p.m. bedtime, Sundays at church and virtually no partying (“I’m not paying $5 for a drink!” she recalls saying indignantly)—nothing that would put her scholarship at risk. In addition to becoming the first female president of the Black Student Union, she also worked at The Diamondback, The Black Explosion, The Baltimore Sun and The Evening Sun. As a rookie Evening Sun reporter, she covered cops, fires and zoning before moving to religion, then bankruptcy. Her story about former Baltimore Colts quarterback Johnny Unitas going broke caught the attention of The Washington Post, which hired her in 1992 to cover business. Her ability to turn dry, complicated topics into interesting stories, combined with her frugal habits like bringing lunch every day (that inevitably led to tales about Big Mama), intrigued her editors, one of whom eventually offered her a column. In the days after the column’s debut, bags of mail arrived in the newsroom, along with hundreds of emails—completely unexpected back in 1997. Readers long intimidated by the business section finally felt like someone was talking to them. The Washington Post Writers Group syndicated “The Color of Money” a little over a year later. Today, the twice-weekly column runs in about 100 newspapers across the country. She can’t answer the dozens of emails she gets each week, but she responds to as many questions as possible during weekly online chats. During these “Testimony Thursdays,” she celebrates those who have paid off crushing loans and high-interest credit card debt, and doles out encouragement and advice to those who haven’t figured it all out. Sometimes, she even nudges overly frugal readers to spend the money they’ve saved on heated leather seats or a tropical vacation.

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“ THANKS TO MICHELLE’S PRINCIPLES, PEOPLE WHO LOST JOBS OR DIVORCED, THEY HAD SAVINGS TO LIVE OFF OF THEY NEVER WOULD HAVE HAD BEFORE.” —Church member Trinita McCall

Singletary and her husband, Kevin McIntyre ’84, lead the Prosperity Partners Ministry at First Baptist Church of Glenarden. Their monthly sessions focus on topics including budgeting, investing and the benefits and pitfalls of credit.

MICHELLE’S FINANCIAL PHILOSOPHY

ALL DEBT IS BAD DEBT.

ALWAYS HAVE POTS OF MONEY.

GIVE, DON’T LEND.

It’s not just credit card or other “frivolous” debt. Avoid student loans by attending community college, earning scholarships or living at home. Save to pay for a car upfront, and drive it into the ground. Make extra mortgage payments on the principal to go into retirement debt-free.

These include a “life happens” fund (a few thousand in case the air conditioning stops working or your car breaks down) and emergency fund (six months of living expenses). Fully fund your retirement at least up to your employer match. Establish and regularly contribute to your children’s college savings plans.

Whether that’s tithing, donating to the Red Cross or helping a relative pay for textbooks, money can make a big difference. But part only with money you don’t need.

PARTNERS IN ACCOUNTABILITY

nmates at the Central Maryland Correctional Facility roll their eyes and groan when Singletary tells them to cut their spending at the commissary in half. That means two weeks without snack cakes or instant ramen to supplement the “goop” they’re served at each meal. The 20 men in the makeshift classroom need better financial habits to avoid returning to crime to make a living, she says. A few argue, but one shouts out, “Free food always tastes good to me!” “That’s my man!” she says, high-fiving him. She shushes and shouts, teases and cajoles, but she doesn’t back down—not with inmates, and not with fellow parishioners of First Baptist Church of Glenarden. That’s where in 2005 she created Prosperity Partners Ministry, a yearlong program modeled after Alcoholics Anonymous that attracts 150 to 200 participants annually (including many from outside the church). She and her husband teach monthly sessions on budgeting, money management for kids and investing basics and coach those who are good with their money to be mentors to the financially challenged. Though Singletary started out solo, they always work together now. McIntyre and she are on the same financial wavelength—he wooed her in college with entire meals cooked in a toaster oven— and he’s gracious about sacrificing his days off to volunteer at the prison with her. He also brings balance to their sessions. While she sings Michael Jackson hits, plays “musical bills” (musical chairs with each chair representing a bill) and does her own version of “Judge Judy,” he provides the calm voice that steadies those who are overwhelmed.

PHOTOS BY JOHN T. CONSOLI; PENNY LETTERING BY HAILEY HWA SHIN

“ PERSONAL FINANCE IS ROCKET SCIENCE THESE DAYS. I UNDERSTAND WHY PEOPLE MAKE BAD FINANCIAL DECISIONS.”

Church member Trinita McCall and her husband endured Singletary’s “financial fast”—21 days of buying only absolute necessities, such as food and medicine, in cash—even as she called the experience “horrible.” But it helped the couple end years of reckless spending without a budget, overdrafting their bank account and charging up credit cards. Today McCall is a leader in the ministry and volunteers with Prosperity Partners. “I had one junior partner who would literally call me in the line at Wal-Mart with a cart full of things so I could talk her down,” McCall says. “A different partner had a box of bills she had never opened. We’re helping people face the reality they’re in.” MICHELLE 2.0

ontrary to most parents, Singletary says, “I don’t want my kids to have it better than me. The way I lived taught me to appreciate what I have.” Her three children, ages 15, 18 and 21, do have it better, of course: They live in a nearly 5,000-square-foot home in Bowie, Md., go on a two-week resort vacation each year and have fully funded 529 plans for college. That doesn’t mean they always appreciated those luxuries when they couldn’t get the newest toys or trendiest outfits. Monique ’17, a family science and psychology double major at umd, recalls Singletary refusing her a new pair of pants, telling her to roll up ones that were too short and pretend they were capris. “It was so frustrating to be told all the time, ‘Do you have money for that?’ I’m young, you’re my mom, just get it for me!” she says. These days, Singletary doesn’t begrudge them the rare name-brand item like an iPad Mini or a North Face jacket when they work for it—though today they rarely ask, and it’s a given that they’ll tithe and put money into savings first. It’s clear her lessons have stuck. “I just had a big epiphany that I am exactly like my mother. I am Michelle 2.0,” says Monique. “When I was growing up, in my head, I’d hear my mom’s voice saying, ‘Is that a need or a want?’ Now, I don’t hear her voice anymore. It’s just my voice: ‘Girl, you don’t need that.’” TERP

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htehee tthe th

BY LIAM FARRELL

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iSCHOOL RESEARCHERS DIGITIZE 1930s MAPS TO SHOW LEGACY OF U.S. HOUSING DISCRIMINATION

fr ank and ethel turner paid $25 a week for 10 years to buy a sliver of America. They turned over most of their meager earnings— $109 a month from Social Security plus rent from four tenants—for the three-story house at 412 Colvin St. in East Baltimore. But when a city inspector tacked a notice to the door on Dec. 14, 1967, that the crumbling house was no longer safe to inhabit, the Turners discovered they didn’t own it at all. According to a Baltimore Sun article published the day of their eviction, the couple had purchased their home with a “land-installment” contract, meaning through a property owner rather than a bank or mortgage company. The payments, ostensibly for the cost of the home, could instead be gobbled up by whatever fees the owner invented. Frank, 79, and Ethel, 67, paid more than $12,000 for rotting floors, grim advice from Legal Aid lawyers and dueling lawsuits with the property owners. It was an inevitable end, written in 30-year-old red ink.

ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN PAYNE; 1937 BALTIMORE MAP COURTESY OF DIGITAL CURATION AND INNOVATION CENTER

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In 1937, local real estate brokers and an economist helped federal officials evaluate each neighborhood in Baltimore to determine eligibility for home loans. On a sliding scale of worth, the Colvin Street area—along with most of the city’s core—was colored red, indicating hazardous for investment. The report noted negatives such as a “heavy concentration of foreigners” and “infiltration of Negro.” These maps and reports were the foundation of “redlining,” which confined African Americans nationwide to specific neighborhoods outside the post-World War II housing boom. Without traditional avenues for home loans, black people were drawn into land-installment contracts and other pernicious methods that laid the groundwork for decades of poverty. A new project by the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies is bringing this material out of the historical shadows by creating a digital atlas of hundreds of Depressionera maps and reports that span thousands of neighborhoods. The Mapping Inequality initiative, says Richard Marciano, director of the Digital Curation and Innovation Center, will provide a new foundation in understanding how the racist policies of the past contribute to the inner-city problems of today. “It’s a continuation of this historical hurt,” he says.

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When Marciano, an expert in digital archives and databases, moved to San Diego in the 1990s, he was curious about his neighborhood’s past. What people told him—that the area once had white occupancy requirements—pulled him into the dark side of American real estate. He collected original deeds for his Mission Hills subdivision and was amazed that racial restrictions from the early 1900s mirrored present-day trends. Eventually, he found that local bigotry had been institutionalized by the federal government through the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (holc). Signed into law in 1933 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, holc was designed to boost the struggling real estate industry during the Great Depression. U.S. residential property construction had fallen by 95 percent, with half of all mortgages in default and more than 1,000 foreclosures a day. Through holc and later programs in the Federal Housing Authority and Veterans Administration, the federal government helped refinance tens of thousands of homes and introduced the modern mortgage standard of smaller down payments and decades-long financing for homes meeting minimum building requirements. To guide its decisions, the government partnered with

real estate officials around the country and drew maps to grade areas as green, blue, yellow or red. holc and its descendant agencies were undeniably successful in expanding homeownership. By 1972, 63 percent of Americans lived in homes they owned, up from 44 percent in 1934. Embracing the romantic ideal of the countryside, the nation underwent a monumental shift to the suburbs, as industry collapsed in inner cities, developers snatched up cheap and plentiful land, and the federal government sank its resources into highway construction and loans for boxy houses planted in rows on the fringes of cities. Baltimore peaked as the sixth-largest U.S. city in 1950, with about 950,000 people; in 2010, the city’s population had plummeted to less than 621,000. In those 60 years, Baltimore County’s ballooned from 270,000 to 805,000. The holc maps dictated what parts of the country were—and weren’t— worth investing in. They put a premium on neighborhoods of single-family homes in all-white hands, with new construction and no evidence of African Americans. The directions for holc assessors considered “lower grade populations or different racial groups” as toxic as slaughterhouses.

Children play in a vacant lot surrounded by crumbling homes on Baltimore’s North Vincent Street in 1962, when the consequences of redlining were already clear.

The three-story house at 1834 McCulloh St. appears unremarkable among other aging rowhomes in West Baltimore. But Antero Pietila, author of the 2010 book “Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City,” sees more than just a building. “That,” he says, “is the turning point.” In June 1910, black lawyer W. Ashbie Hawkins bought that home, crossing the city’s unofficial racial boundaries and setting off panic. Just six months later, Baltimore—at best, part of a grudging Union state during the Civil War—passed the nation’s first housing segregation law. McCulloh Street, and its equivalents across the country, were only the beginning. As job opportunities grew in the North from world wars and Jim Crow discrimination stubbornly remained in the South, millions of black people left Florida fruit groves, Alabama cotton fields and Louisiana swamps for Washington, D.C.’s marble hallways, Chicago’s exploding industry and Los Angeles’ gleaming prosperity. Yet through segregation, whether legal or off the books, poor black migrants were limited in their housing

choices and restricted to run-down and redlined areas. In 1944, the Baltimore housing authority reported that the city needed to replace, renovate or build nearly 33,000 units to accommodate the black population. But holc’s policies, which drove traditional banks and lenders away from African Americans, skewed the housing market. Speculators known as “blockbusters” brokered the sale of homes in white neighborhoods to black buyers—or just fomented the fear of it occurring—to buy properties cheaply. “These were the original colored quarters,” journalist Isabel Wilkerson wrote in her 2011 history of the Great Migration, “The Warmth of Other Suns,” “the abandoned and identifiable noman’s-lands that came into being when the least-paid people were forced to pay the highest rents for the most dilapidated housing owned by absentee landlords trying to wring the most money out of a place nobody cared about.” Some parts of the country, like Detroit and Cicero, Ill., exploded into violence. Baltimore, with ample federal financing for white housing in the suburbs, simply emptied.

“There was no (white) resistance,” Pietila says. “There was just withdrawal.” Although segregation ordinances like Baltimore’s were ruled unconstitutional in 1917, private racial covenants weren’t outlawed until 1948, and the federal government didn’t stop insuring developments with those restrictions for another two years. So in September 1954, after losing her job, Hazel Collins and her elderly mother had to leave their house at 1028 East 20th St. in Baltimore. Collins, an African American, had purchased the home on a land-installment contract and poured her entire $3,000 in savings— plus the proceeds from pawning her furniture, television and kitchen stove— into a house that was never her own. She was shackled to the home even after she left. Collins still owed money on the gas furnace, so she dutifully trekked to a loan office on Harford Road each Saturday to help pay for someone else’s heat. According to a Baltimore Sun article, the home was worth nearly $12,000 in 1952. When last assessed in 2014—after decades of explosive growth in real estate prices—it was valued at $5,000.

SEVENTY PERCENT OF BLACKS “WHO LIVE IN TODAY’S POOREST, MOST RACIALLY SEGREGATED NEIGHBORHOODS ARE FROM THE SAME FAMILIES THAT LIVED IN THE GHETTOES OF THE 1970s.” —Patrick Sharkey

CHILDREN PLAY PHOTO COURTESY OF THE BALTIMORE NEWS-AMERICAN , UMD SPECIAL COLLECTIONS; BALTIMORE ROWHOUSES PHOTO BY JOHN T. CONSOLI

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Helena Hicks Ph.D. ’83 was born at 306 Presstman St. in 1934, the descendant of a long line of free blacks who came to this country as shipbuilders from France. Her father, William Sorrell, was a foreman at the National Biscuit Company and wanted to buy the family’s rented three-story house, with its marble steps, parlor and iron stove. For William, “it was a Sorrell tradition that you own the roof over your head and the land under your feet,” Hicks says. Despite being part of the vibrant center of middle-class black life in Baltimore, the block was labeled by holc as riven by “obsolescence.” “They wanted us out, period,” Hicks says. “They were not going to sell it to black people.” In 1949, the family moved to Somerset Homes, a public housing project in East Baltimore, before eventually buying a home near Druid Hill Park, mere blocks from another redlined section. holc had warned that the neighborhood— colored yellow for its “declining” stature— was in danger of “negro encroachment,” and Hicks’ family watched as white neighbors fled. When she bought her own home in Baltimore’s Grove Park in 1963, it happened again. Hicks still mourns the loss of her birthplace. Her family history of financial success and land ownership was not enough to outswim the redlining undertow. “You destroy people’s sense of who they are when you take away something significant,” she says from the living room of the one-story brick home she has owned for more than 50 years. “It makes you angry because you know it didn’t have to be.” Today, the house on Presstman Street is gone, and the site is a gateway to the wastelands of West Baltimore,

Marciano plans to have the holc datathe nexus of protests and turmoil in base (put together with Nathan Connolly April 2015, where houses can crumble of Johns Hopkins, Rob Nelson of the in high winds. To the southwest are Sandtown-Winchester and Harlem Park, University of Richmond, LaDale Winling of Virginia Tech, and a team of umd with poverty and unemployment rates students), available online in October so double Baltimore’s average, lead paint anyone can see “the definitive national violations triple the average, and nearly map of neighborhood discrimination.” a quarter of buildings standing vacant. With documents digitized and overlaid Life expectancy there is only six months with Google maps, researchers will see longer than in Ethiopia. the legacy of redlining in their cities. The 1968 Fair Housing Act outlawed For example, Marciano found that any form of housing discrimination, public housing complexes in Asheville, including redlining, but in many ways N.C., are in the same areas that were came too late. With inner-city riots in redlined in the 1930s. His tool will make the 1960s and economic stagnation it easy for anyone to make such discoverin the 1970s, poverty begat more poverty. ies, and facilitate new projects that look In his 2013 book “Stuck in Place: Urban at the interplay with everything from Neighborhoods and the End of Progress school test data to supermarket locations. Toward Racial Equality,” sociologist “The notion that redlining is dead,” Patrick Sharkey estimated that more than Marciano says, “is ridiculous.” TERP 70 percent of blacks “who live in today’s poorest, most racially segregated neighborhoods are from the same families that lived in the ghettoes of the 1970s.” A March 2015 study by Demos found FOR MORE INFORMATION the median black household has just ON THE PROJECT, VISIT 6 percent of the wealth of a white one. DCICBLOG .UMD.EDU/MAPPING-INEQUALITY Nearly one-third of that gap is attributable to disparity in homeownership and real estate investment returns: 73 percent of white households own their homes, compared to just 45 percent of blacks. “It’s a sad story,” Hicks says. “It really is a sad story.”

Helena Hicks stands on Presstman Street near the site of her family’s former home. Decades of disinvestment from redlining turned the once-vibrant middle-class community into one of the poorest places in the country.

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HELENA HICKS PHOTO BY JOHN T. CONSOLI

INTERPRETATIONS

Greater College Park

You can reach Dr. Loh at president@umd.edu and follow him on Twitter: @presidentloh

for over 150 years, the University of Maryland has upheld its mission of service to create a highly trained workforce, discover new knowledge, and then translate it into social and economic benefit. In doing so, we have become one of the nation’s premier research universities. To continue our ascent, we must lead in a globalized economy and interconnected world. We must be innovative, diverse and collaborative. This means building a thriving ecosystem that reaches off campus and turns intellectual power into an irresistible force for startups, innovation corporations, new workers and residents. We call this Greater College Park. This ecosystem starts on campus. Our researchers attract more than a half-billion dollars in research funding each year—a dramatic increase that continues to rise. Private donors and the state have taken notice and enabled us to build the Brendan Iribe Center for Computer Science and Innovation to house one of the nation’s preeminent programs in virtual and augmented reality, technology that will transform medicine, education, commerce and gaming. The Edward St. John Learning and Teaching Center will be a national model for cooperative learning spaces and collaborative classrooms. A. James Clark Hall will spur the development of engineering and biomedical technologies to advance human health. And iconic, renovated Cole Field House will integrate research, entrepreneurship and athletics, and position our university as the epicenter for the science of sport. All four new buildings are designed to inspire innovation, to enable our students to move from idea to impact. New companies and startups like FlexEl, FactGem and Immuta have moved to a burgeoning venture district within College Park to tap into our academic resources. More are coming. A new 75,000-square-foot building is in development to meet the growing demand for space by startups and government agencies. The arts will infuse this ecosystem with an attractive cultural vitality. A public-private partnership will create an “art house” to present dance and music performances, lectures, film and poetry slams alongside great food. Another project will create 15,000 square feet of performance spaces for aspiring artists, a teaching kitchen, restaurants and an indoor-outdoor stage. The new Purple Line light rail, set to break ground within the year, will help make College Park an integral and vibrant part of our regional economy. Greater College Park integrates our academic enterprise with industry and government research to create communities pulsing with culture, creativity and innovation. I invite you to see for yourself how we and our partners are making College Park even greater. Homecoming Week, Sept. 25–Oct. 1, is a perfect opportunity to see the changes. Please join us—as Terps, you are part of what makes this a great university.

Park “ Greater integratesCollege our academic

enterprise with industry and government research to create communities pulsing with culture, creativity and innovation.

”

Wallace D. Loh, President

PHOTO BY JOHN T. CONSOLI

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ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

STAY CONNECTED

Wanted: UMD Champions

BALTIMORE NATIONAL AQUARIUM, MAY 5

You don’t have to break a sweat to become a champion. The Alumni Association is recruiting proud Terps to help elevate the reputation of the University of Maryland through its new UMD Champions program.

Alumni Association members enjoyed private access to the Blue Wonders exhibit with University of Maryland faculty and alumni including Les Burke, a diving safety instructor; Beth Claus ’07, an aquarium staff member; and biology Professor Bill Fagan.

Volunteers will help promote university activities and initiatives, foster connections between UMD and its community, share messages that advance the university’s mission and goals and educate the public about important issues. Ways to get involved include spreading the word about Terp news and events through your social media networks or email, attending or speaking at UMD events, and welcoming other

FEARLESS ATLANTA, JUNE 8

UMD President Wallace Loh met with Atlanta-area Terps at the Capital City Club-Brookhaven, an event hosted by Robert Yellowlees ’60.

Terps to do the same—Champions decide their own level of participation.

FOR DETAILS ON THE UMD CHAMPIONS PROGRAM, VISIT ALUMNI.UMD.EDU/CHAMPIONS.

C ALENDA R

12/4

Alumni Night at the Bookstore

Alumni Association members are invited to enjoy holiday drinks, treats, exclusive discounts and a special trunk show of custom Maryland merchandise at the University Book Center in the Adele H. Stamp Student Union. For details and ticket information, visit alumni.umd.edu.

TERPS ON THE HILL, JUNE 13

F O O T B A L L TA I L G AT E S Get your tickets now for this season’s three big tailgate parties, featuring buffets with an open bar and live band in the Samuel Riggs IV Alumni Center. Outside, find family fun with face painting and inflatables, a deejay, autograph sessions with athletes, the Mighty Sound of Maryland and Maryland cheerleaders. And at Homecoming, help celebrate the newest lifetime members of the Alumni Association with the annual unveiling of their names on the Eric S. & Frann G. Francis Lifetime Member Wall.

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HOMECOMING

FIND MORE UPCOMING EVENTS AT ALUMNI.UMD.EDU.

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Alumni and friends networked at the Cannon House Office Building Caucus Room while hearing from members of the Maryland congressional delegation and Loh.

SAN DIEGO PRIDE, JUNE 14

Terps enjoyed views of downtown San Diego while meeting special guests including Director of Athletics Kevin Anderson, Head Football Coach D.J. Durkin, Hall of Fame coach Gary Williams, Alumni Association Executive Director Amy Eichhorst and other athletics coaches.

STAY FEARLESS

STAY ACTIVE

A L U M N I . U M D . E D U

Feeding a Need

e a r ly 200 t e r p s discovered that Sunday brunch is more satisfying when you’re feeding other people instead. The University of Maryland Alumni Association teamed up with the student group Terps Against Hunger on July 17 to pack almost 42,000 high-nutrition

meals for distribution by the Capital Area Food Bank. “Everyone came with such a serving heart and spirit, and it’s great to see it among the Terp family,” said Wanda Alexander ’81, president of the association’s Board of Governors. “When it was done at 12 o’clock, people didn’t stop. They wanted to keep on going.”

Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship. Ü T yser Gottwals Award (for outstanding service to UMD): Bob Bedingfield ’70, a foundation trustee,

Gala to Honor Outstanding Terps The Alumni Association’s 14th annual Awards

Alumni, their children and umd students stood side by side in the Samuel Riggs IV Alumni Center to scoop and measure out 12,000 pounds of rice, soy, dehydrated vegetables and vitamin powder, then weigh, vacuum-seal and box them. Jonathan Fix ’16, founder of Terps Against Hunger, said the group is excited to expand beyond its volunteer base of students to include alumni families. “It’s really special having children and their parents share the experience—it makes it more enriching for the children as well,” he said. The Alumni Association gave awards to the regional and special-interest networks that brought the most volunteers, packed the most meals and raised the most money for the nonprofit. The event will be repeated on a grander scale during Homecoming Week, when Fix hopes 3,500 Terps will volunteer to pack a half-million meals. LEARN MORE AND REGISTER TO VOLUNTEER ON SUNDAY, SEPT. 25 AT HOMECOMING.UMD.EDU.

Entrepreneurs Program. He is chairman and CEO of Southern Management Corp.; and Suzanne is a foundation trustee, member of the College Park

board member for the University of Maryland

Community Engagement Board of Advisors and

System Foundation and retired senior partner at

partner at Hillman & Glorioso.

Ernst & Young. Ü I nternational Award (for leadership to another country’s development): Balaji Sampath Ph.D. ’97,

Ü Spirit of Maryland (for reflecting Terp spirit): Michael ’81 and Mary Dana, supporters of the Incentive Awards Program, avid Terp basketball and

Gala on Sept. 30 will honor Terps who have

founder of the Association for India’s Development.

football fans and parents of four Terps. Michael,

risen to the highest levels of public service,

As a UMD student, he started 25 U.S. chapters of the

president and CEO of Onex Real Estate Partners, is

launched successful companies and made

nonprofit. He also appears on a weekly science TV

groundbreaking discoveries. In addition to

program in India.

15 school and college awards, the following

ÜH umanitarian Award (for extraordinary service

also a UMCPF trustee. Ü Young Alumnus (for accomplishments by alumni ages 35 and under): Ali Von Paris ’12, CEO and founder of

seven Alumni Association awards will be

benefitting others): Capt. Jamal K. Gwathney ’94,

Route One Apparel, specializing in Maryland-themed

presented:

M.D., M.P.H., of the U.S. Public Health Service and

gear, which she founded as a student. Her company

Ü President’s Award (for professional achievement at

clinical director for the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

has raised more than $30,000 for charitable causes

the national level): Kevin Plank ’96, founder and CEO

He has served in countries around the world,

that support the Maryland community.

of Under Armour, the athletic apparel company he

including fighting Ebola in West Africa and provid-

founded while playing football at UMD, a University

ing public health interventions in Flint, Mich.

of Maryland College Park Foundation (UMCPF) trustee,

ÜH onorary Alumni: Suzanne and David Hillman,

and supporter of the new Cole Field House and the

benefactors and founders of the Hillman

1 . MEMORIES OF BLISS PHOTOGRAPHY; 2 . PERFECT DAY PHOTOS; 3. RACHEL COUCH; 4. DANIELLE K ARAGANNIS ' 11, WWW. DANIELLEK ARGANNIS. FORMAT.COM; TERPS AGAINST HUNGER PHOTO BY LISA HELFERT

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THIS YEAR’S EVENT, CONTACT VIRGINIA PINTO AT VPINTO@UMD.EDU OR 301.405.2939.

FALL 2016 TER P

COME BACK TO MARYLAND FOR A WEEK OF FUN, FRIENDS, FOOTBALL, FOOD AND TONS OF TERP SPIRIT. PUMP UP YOUR PRIDE WITH EVENTS THAT WILL MAKE YOU CHEER, THINK AND LAUGH . SHOW YOUR FAMILY AROUND CAMPUS (AND GAWK AT ALL THE CHANGES). REUNITE WITH FORMER ROOMMATES, TEAMMATES AND CLASSMATES. RELIVE THE GLORIES AND SHARE YOUR STORIES. PULL OUT YOUR FAVORITE TERP GEAR AND GET LOUD AS THE TERPS TAKE ON THE PURDUE BOILERMAKERS.

WELCOME HOME, TERPS. SEPT. 25-OCT. 1 HOMECOMING.UMD.EDU

NONPROFIT ORG. U.S. POSTAGE

PAID

TERP MAGAZINE DIVISION OF UNIVERSITY RELATIONS COLLEGE PARK, MD 20742–8724

PERMIT NO. 10 COLLEGE PARK, MD

Change service requested

You don’t have to don a parka and snowshoes to go on an adventure. Push your

boundaries and see the world with the Alumni Association’s Travel Program.

WIN AN ALASKA TRIP FOR TWO JOIN the University of Maryland Alumni Association and be entered to WIN an all-Big Ten cruise. Enter at alumni.umd.edu/DiscoverAlaska or call 800.336.8627 by Oct. 7. Winner to be selected Oct. 10, 2016. Your membership includes an optional $5 tax-deductible contribution, as allowed by law, to the Alumni Association Scholarship Fund. No purchase necessary. For official rules, visit alumni.umd.edu/DiscoverAlaska.