The Key February 26, 2016 Edition

A newsletter for students, faculty, staff, alumni and friends

February 26, 2016

UMES awarded student-driven EPA research grant The University of Maryland Eastern Shore is a recipient of a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency grant being used to underwrite research to degrade herbicides and pesticides quickly and safely.

Dr. Madan K. Kharel, an assistant professor of pharmaceutical science, is the faculty leader of a team of student-researchers that qualified for $15,000 through the EPA’s “People, Prosperity and the Planet” program.

The agency describes the grants program, commonly referred to as “P3” that began in 2004, as a “college competition for designing solutions for a sustainable future. (It)

Faculty and student researchers at UMES, from left, Dr. Marcos Cheney, Emmanuel Ofili, Dr. Madan Kharel, Cui Fang and Dr. Anjan Nan, were awarded a $15,000 EPA “People, Prosperity and the Planet” grant.

EPA / continued on page 6

University’s provost resigns

INSIDE

Dr. Patrick R. Liverpool, UMES’ provost and vice president of academic affairs, is stepping down for health reasons. Today is his final day in the post.

Liverpool joined the administration in July 2014, initially in an interim capacity, and became the university’s chief academic policymaker at the end of the fall 2014 semester.

Together with Vice Provost Kimberly Whitehead and Latasha Wade, the interim associate provost, Liverpool has spearheaded efforts to strengthen and streamline the university’s academic unit. His tenure ends at UMES with the satisfaction of knowing it earned Doctoral University status from the Carnegie Classification organization.

“Dr. Liverpool immersed himself in the opportunities presented to him when I asked him to come to Princess Anne to lead our academic division,” President Juliette B. Bell said. “He has been a valuable member of our

Page 2

Page 3

Spelling Bee Pharmacy Scholarship Student Interns in Annapolis UMES Annapolis Alumna Makes a Difference USDA Diversity Program Day Alumna Honors Father

administrative team during his time here and we wish him the best as he returns home to Richmond.”

The veteran administrator has served as provost and vice president for academic affairs at several universities while those institutions conducted searches.

Prior to coming to UMES, he was interim dean of the business school at North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro.

“His sense of humor has a way of lightening up a meeting. It puts people at ease. It encourages us to feel a sense of ownership in this university,” said Dean Cooledge, acting chair of English and Modern Languages. “He has a sincere desire to make this a better university, and enouraged us all to believe in that.”

Before carving a niche over the past decade as an interim university administrator, PROVOST / continued on page 2

Page 4

Black History Month Coretta Scott King Rose Speaks Tubman Play

Page 5

48 Hours Results Homecoming Gifts

Page 6

Athlete Sets Record

Page 7

Page 8

Retool School Calendar of Writing Center Events Dietetics Interns Thomas Loveland

2

The Key / February 26, 2016

Circling the Oval

Seven competitors return for spelling bee The 2016 edition of the Maryland Eastern Shore Regional Spelling Bee will crown a new champion Sat., March 5.

Gia Bautista of Salisbury, the winner the past two years, is now a high school freshman and is retired from competition, according to national spelling bee rules.

Her younger sister, Ava, who was a competitor a year ago, is among seven students from Maryland’s lower Eastern Shore who have qualified to return to this year’s competition.

The others are eighth-grader Destiny Evans of Crisfield Academy and High School, Jonathan Benton of Somerset Intermediate School, Stacey Fisher of Northwestern Elementary School, Maya Matava of Salisbury Middle School and Michelle Rao of Pemberton Elementary School. Maegan Britton was Holly Grove Christian School’s 2015 representative but was unable to participate because of illness.

The fourth annual regional spelling bee will be at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, which sponsors the winner in an all-expense paid trip to the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington. The event gets underway at 10 a.m. in the Ella Fitzgerald Center.

The regional bee is conducted much the same as the national competition that airs in primetime on ESPN in late May. Competitors are presented a word to spell in front of a panel of judges and an audience. Successful spellers continue to the next round, while a misspelled word eliminates the competitor.

One or two rounds will bypass the time-honored spelling routine and instead challenge competitors to select an answer from a multiple-choice list asking for the definition of a word presented by the announcer. (All competitors at the national level take a computerized vocabulary test that is used as a tie-breaker.)

UMES Day in Annapolis

The Legislative Black Caucus of Maryland paid tribute during UMES Day in Annapolis with a resolution acknowledging the contributions of the late Arthur A. King, (Maryland State College, 1954), one of the group’s founders.

PROVOST / continued from cover

Liverpool was dean of the business school at Delaware State University, where he also was the MBNA Professor of Management.

“I consider it a privilege to have served the university under Dr. Bell’s exemplary leadership,” Liverpool said. “I strongly believe UMES is a wonderful university with an outstanding faculty and tremendous potential. I look forward to continuing to watch the university’s growth and development.”

Bell said she would move quickly to name an interim replacement in the coming days, as well as begin a national search for a new provost.

Dr. Margarita Treuth, UMES’ chair of the kinesiology department, and seniors in the program, Dominique Williams and Ashley Smith, measure Salisbury real estate developer Palmer Gillis’ blood pressure and heart rate at UMES Day in Annapolis Feb. 11. University administrators, students, faculty and alumni were present to greet legislators and visitors to the Maryland State House with health screenings and information.

UMES People

The Key / February 26, 2016

3

UMES student interns in Annapolis

Pharmacy association awards scholarship to UMES student Salematou Traore of Laurel, Md. is among 13 students named by the American Pharmacists Association Foundation as winners in its 2016 Student Scholarship Program. The $1,000 scholarships are in memory of Mary Munson Runge, the first woman and African-American to serve as president of the American Pharmacists Association. The award recognizes “students who invest their time through active involvement in their school’s American Pharmacists Association Academy of Student Pharmacists chapter.”

Recipients will be recognized March 7 at the association’s annual meeting in Baltimore. Traore is also one of 83 students serving as ambassadors of the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

Making a difference in the community Valarie Matthews, right, 2011-12 SGA president, and her sister, Shannon Morgan, are co-founders of Catherine’s Family and Youth Services Inc., a non-profit in the Park Heights area of Baltimore. What started as a community trash collection nearly a year ago has grown. Named for their grandmother, the charity now provides family assistance (help with rent and utilities, clothing and food banks, job referral and resume assistance) and youth outreach (health and wellness education and afterschool programs).

Photo by Diamond Johnson

Kadeem C. Turnbull, a criminal justice major slated to graduate in May—a year early, is serving as a political intern in the Maryland General Assembly. Turnbull was chosen to work with Del. Jay Walker, a Democrat who represents District 26 in Prince George’s County. Born in Jamaica, he came to the U.S. when he was 10.

Turnbull plans on returning to UMES following graduation to earn a master’s in criminology, but not before a little time traveling in Europe “to reward himself for his hard work.” Ultimately, he would like to attend Columbia University’s law school.

UMES students selected for USDA diversity program Jamal Palmer, Ar’Quette Grant and Ben Webster are in Arlington, Va., this week attending the USDA’s Agricultural Outlook Forum as part of its Student Diversity Program. Twenty undergraduate and 10 graduate students will receive information on career opportunities, tour Washington and attend the forum. The program exposes “students to contemporary agribusiness, future trends, scientific research and agricultural policy in today’s environment.”

Alumna honors late father Corey Haynes,’13, marked the 10th anniversary (Dec. 2) of her father’s death from cancer by shaving her head as an awareness and fundraising event for St. Baldrick’s Foundation.

Hayes is teaching in a bilingual school in Managua, Nicaragua as a Peace Corps volunteer.

She, five of her peers and four young students at the school raised $5,000 for childhood cancer research by shaving their heads at the event. Her message to children with cancer; being bald is nothing to be ashamed of.

4

School News

The Key / February 26, 2016

Black History Month; UMES Moment Members of Alpha Kappa Alpha on the lower Eastern Shore wanted to celebrate the national sorority’s 70th anniversary in a spectacular way in 1978, so they invited a high-profile guest to their party.

During the last weekend of February that year, Coretta Scott King came to the Lower Shore, where she received the key to the City of Salisbury and was guest of honor at a luncheon on the UMES campus.

She delivered a talk to what a local newspaper described as a capacity crowd at the 1,200-seat Ella Fitzgerald Center.

A snapshot from that day, Feb. 25, shows Mrs. King emerging from the Student Development Center, the site of the Saturday luncheon, with Omega Moore Jones Frazier (Princess Anne Academy class of 1926) at her side.

Mrs. King’s visit warranted articles in The (Salisbury) Daily Times and the Marylander and Herald, a weekly newspaper published in Princess Anne.

The first paragraph of the Marylander and Herald article conveys an uplifting tone, describing her as “the celebrity of celebrities” who endured “a tiring, whirlwind two days of events.”

The AKA graduate chapter, Delta Sigma Omega, and the UMES undergraduate chapter, Alpha Omicron, sponsored the sorority’s Founders’ Day activities. Luncheon proceeds went to support the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change founded by Mrs. King in 1968, the

Black History Month speaker

Kwame Rose, a 21-year old Baltimore activist who came to the forefront for youth advocacy during the Freddie Gray demonstrations, spoke Feb. 10 during a Black History Month event. Rose challenged Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera about what he believed to be an inaccurate representation of the April 2015 protests in Baltimore. He is a contributing writer for Abernathy Magazine, UrbanCusp.com and City Paper.

year of her husband’s assassination.

The UMES speech by Mrs. King, an honorary AKA member, amplified her husband’s mantra as the nation’s pre-eminent civil rights leader. She pointed out Native Americans, Hispanics and farmers had emerged as voices demanding “human rights.” She also mentioned a need to support the cause of women’s rights.

Mrs. King urged the audience to prod Congress to pass the HumphreyHawkins Act of 1978, federal legislation that prohibited discrimination based on gender, religion, race, age and national origin in any (jobs) program created under the act.

And just as her husband did, she challenged listeners to register to vote, the Marylander and Herald reported, which quoted her as saying “the ballot is a powerful tool at everyone’s disposal.”

Friday evening prior to her UMES visit, Mrs. King attended an invitationonly reception in Salisbury that drew by an estimated 200 people.

Credited with organizing the festivities were Frazier, identified as the Delta Sigma Omega chapter president at the time; Ruby Holland Lynk, a past president; and members Mary Chapman and Mary Fair Burks, a UMES English professor.

Burks was friends with Dr. and Mrs. King when they all lived in Alabama in the 1950s, where a bus boycott in Montgomery sparked the Civil Rights movement. Burks, who also knew Rosa Parks, taught at UMES for 26 years, retiring in 1986.

Harriet Tubman play

Alumna (‘68 ) and Hollywood actress Starletta DuPois is pictured with Eunice Seagraves and alumnus Thomas Percy (’65) at the UMES National Alumni Association sponsored event, “Harriet Tubman: Defender.” The one-woman play starring Seagraves of Broadway’s “The Wiz” fame and written by Percy presented Tubman’s life and role in the underground railroad through narrative and song.

The Key / February 26, 2016

School News

5

Alumni groups present gifts during Homecoming festivities Top right, clockwise:

Annapolis Alumni Chapter - $1,500

National Alumni Association - $4,500

PHOTO BY JIM GLOVIER

Groove Phi Groove Social Fraternity- $8,000 National Pan-Hellenic Council- $1,000 Baltimore Alumni Chapter - $5,000 No Photo:

Tri-County Alumni Association- $1,000

PHOTO BY JIM GLOVIER

Because of your generosity, we exceeded our goal!

Because of your generosity, we exceeded our goal!

$54,901

114 percent of the goal

k You!u!

Tha nk Yo

Tha n

6

The Key / February 26, 2016

Athletics

Junior UMES men’s runner sets records Long-distance runner Khalil Rmidi Kinini is making his mark on UMES’ track and field record book, establishing new individual performance standards that have not been seen in Princess Anne in many years.

Earlier this month, the 20-year-old junior from Spain set a new school and Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference mark by winning the 3000-meter (1.86 mile) race at the indoor championship meet, clocking a time of 8-minutes 30-seconds (.044).

Rmidi Kinini also won the 3.1 mile race and helped the four-man medley relay team win its race at the MEAC indoor meet.

Those performances earned him recognition as the MEAC Outstanding Men’s Runner, who accounted for 32.5 of the team’s 103 points and helped UMES to a third-place finish.

The Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference (on Feb. 17) also named Rmidi Kinini its Division I Indoor Track &

Field Men’s Runner of the Week for his MEAC meet achievements, the first Hawk track athlete to be so honored in school history, according UMES’ athletics department.

For the current MEAC competition season, Rmidi Kinini has posted the conference’s best times in the mile, 3,000 meter and 5,000 meter races.

This past fall, he was instrumental in helping UMES’ cross country team win the 2015 MEAC championship. He demonstrated his ability to match other elite East Coast longdistance runners by finishing sixth in a field of 181 entered in the 8-kilometer race at the prestigious Princeton (N.J.) Invitational. He finished with a time of 24:09.2, second best in UMES history.

A marketing major, Rmidi Kinini plans to go on to graduate school with a goal of working in a sports business.

He will be running in his final regularseason indoor track event this Sunday, competing in the Boston University Last Chance meet.

EPA / continued from cover

offers students ... hands-on experience that brings classroom learning to life.”

Assisting Kharel, the principal investigator, are Cui Fang, a first-year master’s student in the pharmaceutical science program specializing in drug discovery and development, and second-year pharmacy (Pharm.D.) student Emmanuel Ofili. Also lending an assist are Dr. Marcos Cheney in the Department of Natural Sciences and Dr. Anjan Nan, a School of Pharmacy colleague.

UMES was one of 35 colleges or universities to qualify for a 2016 grant and one of two historically black institutions. The other was Texas Southern University.

As an 1890 land-grant university, UMES has a long history of tackling problems encountered by those who depend on or work in agriculture.

“Agro-chemicals (that kill invasive plants and insects) have been routinely used (on) farms to maintain good agricultural productivity,” Kharel wrote in the grant application. “However, many of chemicals are resistant to degradation under the normal environmental conditions.”

“The routine release of such chemicals and their persistence in the environment have been posing a serious risk … to public health and the environment,” the UMES grant application says.

“This project is dedicated to developing a system to facilitate the degradation of these agro-chemicals without causing additional negative environmental impact.”

According to the EPA, teams selected for “Phase 1” awards received grants of up to $15,000 to fund the development of their projects to be showcased at the National Sustainable Design Expo in Washington this spring.

After the Expo, P3 teams will compete for additional awards of up to $75,000 “to further develop their designs and potentially bring them to the marketplace.”

“This year’s P3 teams have created innovative research projects that tackle some of our most pressing environmental and public health challenges,” said Dr. Thomas A. Burke, EPA’s science advisor and deputy assistant administrator of its Office of Research and Development.

“These students have the opportunity to bring their exciting new ideas for innovation in sustainability to life, by expanding their learning experience beyond the classroom,” Burke said.

School News

The Key / February 26, 2016

Faculty and staff spotlight

Retool Your School is back for 2016!

Dr. Thomas Loveland, an associate professor in UMES’ Department of Technology, was recently elected to the National Executive Board of the Council on Technology and Engineering Teacher Education. The council, part of the International Technology and Engineering Educator Association, focuses on educational research, national accreditation of teacher preparation programs and presentations at national conferences. Loveland will serve a threeyear term starting with the ITEEA 2016 conference March 1-4 in Washington, D.C. Loveland is also the conference chair of the local planning committee.

Voting starts today, Feb. 26!

Visit retoolyourschool.com

CAMPUS IMPROVEMENT GRANT PROGRAM UMES has applied for three Home Depot HBCU grants with a maximum award of $100,000: • Tier I Grant for a possible $50,000, • Campus Pride Grant for a possible $30,000 • Tier II Grant for a possible $20,000 A new “cluster structure,” which pits similar sized schools against each other, increases UMES’ chances of winning $50,000.

The Campus Pride Grant goes to the school in each cluster with the most online votes and social media activity.

#HomeDepotRYS16

University Writing Center at UMES We would love to help you with any stage or aspect of the writing process.

New this semester: Online tutoring and graduate tutoring.

Please stop by to see us!

Director: Dr. Terry Smith, tsmith@umes.edu Location: Wilson 1106 Hours: Monday-Thursday 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Friday 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Website for information: www.umes.edu/writingcenter Website for scheduling: https://umes.mywconline.com/

7

UMES dietetic interns From left, Cameron Cutler, Susan Skaleski, Nicole Bollinger and Jennifer Pope attended a 2016 pediatric symposium at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. They also presented at a journal club for local dietitians at Deer’s Head Hospital Center in Salisbury.

8

The Key / February 26, 2016

Calendar

march 2 Gallery Talk

Noon-1 p.m. Mosely Gallery Bring a brown bag lunch and discuss “The Relevance of Black History in Current Artistic Practice.”

410-651-7770 www.moselygallery.com

UMES Music Faculty Recital

7 p.m.

Asbury United Methodist Church 1401 Camden Ave., Salisbury Isrea Butler, trombone; Veronica Knier, piano/organ; Brian Dean, piano; Brian Perez, saxophone 410-651-6571

Gourmet Luncheon Series* HOME-

!

T U O D L O S

OU THANK Y R FOR YOU T! SUPPOR

9

Jazz & Popular Music Concert

7:30 p.m.

Salisbury University, Holloway Hall UMES and SU host Jason and Rosena Jackson for an evening of jazz. University ensembles also perform. 410-651-6571

24

Art Exhibit-Opening Reception

5

Maryland Eastern Shore Spelling Bee

4-6 p.m. Mosely Gallery “UMES Student Show.”Fine arts (visual) students showcase works.

Show on display through April 21.

410-651-7770 www.moselygallery.com

10 a.m.

Ella Fitzgerald Center Top spellers from local elementary and middle schools vie to represent the Lower Shore at the Scripps National Spelling Bee competition in Washington, D.C. 410-651-6669

*Unless stipulated (*) all events listed are free and open to the public.

T H E UMES MISSION The University of Maryland Eastern Shore, the state’s historically black, 1890 land-grant institution, has its purpose and uniqueness grounded in distinctive learning, discovery and engagement opportunities in the arts and science, education, technology, engineering, agriculture, business and health professions.

UMES is a student-centered, doctoral research degree-granting university known for its nationally accredited undergraduate and graduate programs, applied research and highly valued graduates.

UMES provides individuals, including first-generation college students, access to a holistic learning environment that fosters multicultural diversity, academic success, and intellectual and social growth.

UMES prepares graduates to address challenges in a global, knowledgebased economy while maintaining its commitment to meeting the workforce and economic development needs of the Eastern Shore, the state, the nation and the world.

The University of Maryland Eastern Shore prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, religion, national origin, disability, marital status, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression. Inquiries regarding the application of Federal laws and nondiscrimination policies to University programs and activities may be referred to the Office of Equity & Compliance/Title IX Coordinator by telephone (410) 651-7848 or e-mail (titleix@umes.edu).

The KEY is published by the Office of Public Relations in the Office of the President 410-651-7580 FAX 410-651-7914 www.umes.edu

Editors Gail Stephens, Assistant Director of Public Relations and Publications Manager Bill Robinson, Director of Public Relations Design by Debi Rus, Rus Design Inc. Printed by The Hawk Copy Center Submissions to The KEY are preferred via email. All copy is subject to editing.The Key is written according to the Associated Press stylebook.