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Maryland Moments, October, 2004 University Initiatives (New Programs, Honors, Awards) Two federal tenants anchor a massive research park that UM plans to build near to its campus and the College Park Metro station. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration's National Center for Weather and Climate Prediction and the UM's Center for the Advanced Study of Languages, a university partnership with the National Security Agency, are to be built. The park, known as M Square, could eventually encompass two million square feet of commercial space and employ as many as 5,000 people. It will be the largest research center in the Washington area. President C.D. Mote Jr. was one of three university presidents appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, detailing how post-Sept. 11 immigration policies are stunting the scientific growth of the nation. Mote said tight visa restrictions are sending the world's best and brightest to countries such as Canada and Australia, leaving U.S. businesses at a competitive disadvantage. "We all agree that protecting our citizens is a priority second to none," Mote said in a prepared statement. "We also have a ... responsibility to deliver the highest-quality education and research programs to keep the nation strong and competitive. We do not believe these are mutually exclusive mandates."
President Mote joined the U.S. Deputy Secretary of Education, Eugene Hickok, and California Congressman Buck McKeon at a higher education forum sponsored by The Atlantic Monthly. Scripps Howard News Service quoted McKeon, a frequent critic of public higher education policies, as saying the cost of an education is a national crisis. "The problem is complex, with universities competing to get better students, professors and research grants while money from state governments is shrinking, the panelists said. Unlike other free enterprise markets, 'There simply is no demand for low-quality, low-cost education,' said C.D. Mote Jr., president of the University of Maryland. 'It just isn't there.' "
The Institute of Higher Education at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University ranks the world's best universities, giving the most weight to the quality of faculty and amount of research. UM ranks No. 57 in the world, No. 41 in North America, No. 38 in the U.S. and No. 19 among U.S. public universities. A sample of schools ranking behind UM: Carnegie Mellon University, Rice University, Ohio State University, Purdue University, Case Western Reserve, Brown University and Dartmouth College.
Law enforcement groups in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia began sharing law enforcement data via the Capital Wireless Integrated Network. The federally funded CapWin system, developed by the Clark School's Center for Advanced Transportation Technology, gave law enforcers wireless access to data. Federal, state, and local agencies participating in the program use desktop PCs or wireless laptops to retrieve the data. Maryland and Virginia police also tested access to the network over Pocket PC-based PDAs.
UM faculty member David Poeppel, who holds joint appointments in the university's departments of linguistics and biology, won the American Academy's 2004 Daimler Chrysler Berlin Prize. He is the first scientist to win a coveted fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany. Until Poeppel's appointment, Berlin scholars had represented only the cultural and public policy disciplines.
Technology Review selected a list of the top 100 innovators under the age of 35, "Who Are Transforming Technology—and the World." Min Wu, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, was honored for devising "ways to hide digital watermarks in financial statements and other electronic documents to authenticate records, prevent fraud and deter unauthorized distribution." UM is one of 15 colleges receiving grants from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, and the school planned to use $25,000 to help pay roughly 175 students up to $200 each to work Nov. 2 in Prince George's County. The students were to make make up for more than half of the shortfall of 300 election judges that Prince George's suffered in the last election, said Paul Hernnson, director of the UM's Center for American Politics and Citizenship. Congressman Steny Steny Hoyer secured the grant to make the effort possible.
The Smith School plans two new MBA programs in China. Smith's first entry into China was an executive MBA curriculum in Beijing that started in January 2003. The school now plans an executive MBA program in Shanghai and a program for senior managers of Otis Elevator in Tianjin. The 18-month executive MBA program is designed for mid-to-senior level executives. Dean Howard Frank traveled to Shanghai as part of an economic development mission headed by Gov. Robert Ehrlich.
The Clark School of Engineering's Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute gathered an expert team of 17 venture capitalists, investors, attorneys, marketing specialists and successful entrepreneurs to teach students and faculty members how to turn an innovative product idea into a successful, technology-based company. The event, called the Technology Startup Boot Camp, was held October 22. President C.D. Mote Jr. and Montgomery College president Charlene Nunley signed an agreement designed to help local biotechnology companies find more recruits in a burgeoning industry. The agreement set the stage for allowing students to take four years of coursework for biotechnology programs at the Montgomery College-Germantown Campus but earn a bachelor's degree in life sciences from the University of Maryland.
Mark Lewis, who is on leave from his position as professor of aerospace engineering and director of the a UM-based NASA/DOD space vehicle technology institute, is the new Air Force chief scientist. Lewis is a member of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board. Society & Culture
The Program on International Policy Attitudes releases a snapshot of Iraq war misperceptions that is startling enough to earn world-wide media attention. A large majority of President Bush's supporters continued to believe that Iraq either had weapons of mass destruction (47 percent) or a major program to develop them (25 percent), contrary to official findings. And three out of four Bush backers believed Saddam Hussein provided substantial support to al Qaeda or was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, while 56 percent said the Sept. 11 commission found such ties. In reality, the commission found "no collaborative relationship" between Iraq and al Qaeda. The survey showed supporters of Bush and Sen. John Kerry had stark differences and saw "separate realities."
Jacques Gansler, director of the Center for Public Policy and Private Enterprise. and William Lucyshyn, visiting senior research scholar in public policy, co-author an influential report that states few federal employees have been thrown out of work in their agencies' efforts to determine if private contractors can do their jobs better and more cheaply. Gansler said federal unions are using "scare tactics" to oppose competitive outsourcing.
Faculty member Shibley Telhami, one of the nation's leading experts on Middle East affairs and author of the recent book The Stakes: America in the Middle East, addresses what's at stake for the U.S. after the Nov. 2 election in an Oct. 27 forum. The presentation capped Maryland's First Year Book Program that distributed 7,500 copies of The Stakes to freshmen and other students to spark broad campus-wide discourse about dangers and opportunities in the Middle East.
A tape of a mysterious American man claiming to be a member of Al-Qaeda, delivered to ABC News, earns the media's attention. The tape of "Azzam the American" cannot be authenticated by ABC, which employed UM's Gerald Lampe to vet the authenticity of the video. Lampe and others believe English was not Azzam's first language. They speculate he may have learned English as a child in a household of non-native speakers.
The combined voices of the Internet trump the movie critic. A survey of 2,000 people found that television ads and recommendations from others were the biggest influences on movie-going habits, each factor cited by about 70 percent of respondents. Professional reviews ran a distant third at 33 percent. Sites like Rottentomatoes.com, which compile reviews from professional critics but also Internet newcomers, have become more valuable than the opinions of individual critics, said Chris Dellarocaso of the Smith School of Business, one of three researchers who conducted the survey.
The efforts of David Kirsch, assistant professor of management and organization, to catalogue the dot.com businesses which went bust in the late 1990s and just beyond 2000, receives national media attention. Kirsch's focus is to collect business plans--in his mind, to let these documents lie idle and scattered is to risk losing an important piece of American business and cultural history.
The J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism, affiliated with the Merrill College of Journalism, launches a nationwide program to promote community news issues that fall under the radar of the mainstream media. Jan Schaffer, the institute's executive director, said the New Voices program would help new forms of media grow.
The Boston Globe: "Recent polling developed by Jerome Segal of the Center for International And Security Studies at the University of Maryland and conducted by the Steinmetz Center for Peace Research at Tel-Aviv University has found that a majority of Israeli Jews (54.4 percent favor, 29.6 percent oppose) support a unilateral withdrawal encompassing the West Bank as well as the Gaza Strip, provided that from an international point of view, such a withdrawal ends the territorial dimension of the conflict, with Israel recognized as a Jewish state within a permanent boundary." Science & Technology
William Jeffery, professor of biology, and colleagues ascertain which genes cause ocular degeneration in cavefish. Their findings are published in the journal Nature. Agence France-Presse: "The blind cavefish, a curiosity of nature, has a clever genetic trick that destroys its sight, thus giving itself an advantage in a pitch-dark watery world, scientists believe. Astyanax mexicanus lives in deep, lightless caves off the Mexican coast. Soon after the cavefish starts developing in the egg, its eyes begin to degenerate and the fish is born blind. But fish of the same species which live in fresh water where there is light, grow eyes and have normal vision."
Sarah Tishkoff, assistant professor of biology, and Kenneth Kidd, professor of genetics, psychiatry, and molecular, cellular and developmental biology at Yale University, co-author an article in the journal Nature Genetics which is utilized by the New York Times to point to differences among scientists regarding genetics and race. "A difference of opinion about the genetic basis of race has emerged between scientists at the National Human Genome Center at Howard University and some other geneticists. At issue is whether race is a useful signpost to tracking down the genes that cause disease, given that certain diseases are more common in some populations than others.... But several other geneticists... say the human family tree is divided into branches that correspond to the ancestral populations of each major continent, and that these branches coincide with the popular notion of race. 'The emerging picture is that populations do, generally, cluster by broad geographic regions that correspond with common racial classification (Africa, Europe, Asia, Oceania, Americas),' says Dr. Sarah A. Tishkoff... and Dr. Kenneth K. Kidd.... "
Kennedy Paynter, a biologist affiliated with the College of Life Sciences, continues to be at the center of state efforts to resuscitate the oyster population in the Chesapeake Bay. The Baltimore Sun described a program that creates sanctuaries for native disease-free oysters where the Chester River meets the bay. Ready to harvest them at the end of the month are the region's watermen, who have a stake in the success of this effort. "Over the past year, watermen have guarded the bar from would-be rogue harvesters. 'It's not just a "come and get 'em for half a day and sell them," ' said Kennedy Paynter, the University of Maryland oyster biologist who's been monitoring the reserve bars. 'It's really incorporating the watermen in a larger experiment.' This project will not replenish what once was, and the state is considering introducing an Asian, disease-resistant oyster into the bay."
UM's astronomy department contributes to a research team that discovers more "globular clusters" in our Milky Way. According to findings published in the Astronomical Journal, astronomers are surprised to continue to find these fossils. "Globular clusters" date back to the birth of the Milky Way, 13 or so billion years ago. They are sprinkled around the center of the galaxy like seeds in a pumpkin. New infrared images from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the University of Wyoming Infrared Observatory revealed a never-before-seen globular cluster within the dusty confines of the Milky Way.
Jane Clark, professor of kinesiology, leads a study that seeks children who have trouble with basic motor skills to find how children best learn hand-eye coordination tasks. Clark: "We recently found, to our surprise, that normally developing children learn hand-eye coordination tasks just as well if they're exposed to the task all at once, instead of in small steps. That surprised us, because it's been shown that adults learn better in gradual steps. Now, we want to do the same study with children who have Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD). Our goal is to understand what therapies work best for children with DCD."
Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array (VLA) overcome longstanding technical hurdles to map the sky at little-explored radio frequencies that could provide a tantalizing look deep into the early Universe. The scientists released images and data covering half of the visible sky. One of the astronomers is Professor Emeritus William Erickson.
A NASA-led team is studying the construction of a railway in space for a pair of telescopes that will provide views of planets, stars and galaxy formation in unprecedented detail. The proposed Space Infrared Interferometric Telescope (SPIRIT) mission will also examine the atmospheric chemistry of giant planets around other stars. SPIRIT will consist of two telescopes at opposite ends of a 120-foot (40-meter) beam. The telescopes will move along the beam like cars on a railway, combining their images by using the techniques of interferometry to achieve the resolving power of a single giant telescope 120 feet across. UM is part of a NASA-Goddard team of public and private institutions collaborating on the project, which is part of the agency's Origins program. If selected, the mission would launch in 2014. Other schools on the team are the California Institute of Technology, Cornell University, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, the University of California-Los Angeles and the University of Wisconsin.
The interest in NASA's Deep Impact mission, directed by Michael A'Hearn, professor of astronomy, was sure to snowball leading up to its late-December blastoff from Cape Canaveral. October saw Boulder's Ball Aerospace assembly plant ship the $300 million Deep Impact spacecraft to Florida for a Dec. 30 launch. The Denver Post: "Six months after taking flight, the SUV-size craft will release its (800 pound) copper bullet into the path of the comet, Tempel 1. The two will collide at nearly 25,000 mph, said Mike A'Hearn, Deep Impact science team leader at the University of Maryland. No one is sure what will happen next, A'Hearn conceded. Some models show the impact blasting a football-stadium-size crater into the comet, which has a 3-mile diameter. But the hole could be smaller or larger."
UM completed a $775,000 expansion of its Bioprocess Scale-up Facility in order to have room for more biotechnology companies and to accommodate projects through to completion. The facility, part of the Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute, is one of only a handful of state university facilities where biotechs can develop a purified product for research and discovery from the biological process of creating cells. BioSET Engineering Technologies, a tenant of the Clark School's Technology Advancement Program, found a way to "heal the bone and muscle injury" surrounding an injury like a nasty bone fracture. The Washington Post: "BioSET's research, which has not yet reached human trials, is based on adding peptides as an ultra-thin coating to medical implants. The peptides would be released over days or weeks directly into the damaged bone and muscle tissue."
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 Information provided by the Office of University CommunicationsEmail University Communications at emailum@umd.edu |
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