CNMS FACULTY NEWS

Roy Hoff named as a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society
Congratulations to Dr. Roy Hoff, Professor of Physics, who was recently selected as a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society. Dr. Hoff directs JCET and GEST, two collaborative NASA-UMBC research centers, and is recognized for his expertise on air pollution, climate and the atmosphere.

Manil Suri selected to receive Elkins Professorship
Congratulations to Dr. Manil Suri, Professor of Mathematics, who was selected to receive one of four Wilson H. Elkins Professorships awarded for FY 2008 in recognition of his work to foster interest and learning in mathematics among K-12 students and the general public. Many outstanding scholars have received this award, which represents the first permanent endowed, university-wide professorship. It was initiated in 1978 in honor of Wilson H. Elkins, a former University of Maryland president, and was expanded to include the USM family in 1988.

Robert Reno named as Presidential Teaching Professor, 2007- 2010
Congratulations to Dr. Robert C. Reno, Associate Professor of Physics, was recognized for his outstanding contributions to the education of graduate and undergraduate students over his 33-year teaching career at UMBC. Selected as the UMBC Presidential Teaching Professor, 2007 - 2010, Dr. Reno was honored at the UMBC Presidential Faculty & Staff Awards Ceremony on April 11, 2007.

Dr. Jeffery Leips Selected for National GENA Project
Dr. Jeff Leips, Assistant Professor of Biology, was recently selected to participate in the Geneticist-Educator Network of Alliances (GENA), a project funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation to the American Society of Human Genetics and the Genetics Society of America. Over the next year, Dr. Leips will work with Lissa Rotundo, a high school biology teacher at nearby Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, to develop and assess the success of inquiry-based teaching modules for Properties of Inheritance. Ms. Rotundo is an alumna of the 2004-2005 Teacher Quality in Biology (TQB) Program at UMBC. The Leips/Rotundo team will attend a three-day GENA workshop this summer in Bethesa, MD and will then work on a high school curriculum piece for use throughout the following academic year. Dr. Leips is one of only 12 geneticists, from more than 80 applications, who was selected for the first cohort.

A Conference in Honor of Thomas I. Seidman
The conference, Advances in Control of Partial Differential Equations, was held at UMBC from October 28 to 29, 2006 in honor of Dr. Thomas I. Seidman's outstanding scientific contributions on the occasion of his 70th birthday and 35th year of service to UMBC. The conference featured a scientific program centered around plenary sessions by invited speakers, a panel discussion dedicated to future directions of the field and a poster session. The conference was supported by NSF and UMBC.

Brewster Receives Presidential Honors
Rachel M. Brewster, Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at UMBC, was honored on July 26th with the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), which provides up to five years of financial support for research and community outreach. Dr. Brewster will use the award to continue to involve high school, undergraduate and graduate students in her lab's research, which is focused on the genetic analysis of zebrafish embryos to better understand the causes of birth defec ts of the brain and central nervous system. She was one of three biologists nominated by the National Science Foundation for this honor. Overall, President Bush honored just 60 young scientists for their leadership, research accomplishments and educational contributions. (UMBC News and Events article)

Breakthrough Science by UMBC Physics Faculty in the area of Active Galactic Nuclei
Dr. Jane Turner and Dr. Ian George, with collaborator Dr. Lance Miller (Oxford University, U.K.) were awarded one of the longest observations (500 ksec exposure) ever undertaken by the XMM-Newton satellite, to observe an interesting "active" galaxy, Mkn 766. The data have yielded a long-sought result, a tight correlation between the strength of an emission line from the K-shell of Fe atoms (the strongest line visible in the X-ray band) and the X-ray continuum flux that illuminates the accretion disk. This long-sought correlation offers a breakthrough in understanding the fundamental process of accretion onto a black hole (and ultimately the co-evolution of supermassive black holes and their host galaxy.)

The favored model for the central region of active galaxies has these powered by accretion onto a million - billion solar mass black hole. Any information from the accretion disk could then be used to confirm our basic hypothesis and derive details of the disk, and hence the accretion process. The X-ray continuum flux is believed to be produced in a coronal region sandwiching the disk, where relativiostic electrons. Compton-upscatter UV photons produced from the inner accretion disk. Some of this continuum shines back onto the disk surface and produces some spectral features, the strongest is emission from the K-shell of Fe (due to its strong fluoresence yield and high abundance). We expect the line profile to be distorted by the combined effects of special and general relativity, the "signatures" of the inner disk. We also expect a tight correlation between illuminating X-rays and disk emission, whose timescales of variability and constraints on the line/continuum lag could yield the only available probes of the accretion flow, and a rare probe of general relativity in the very strong gravity regime.

Attempts (over the last two decades) to model line profiles have been subject to ambiguity, as spectral analysis of data currently available in the X-ray band has only modest energy resolution. Thus astronomers have sought hard for the expected correlation between Fe K-shell emission and X-ray continuum. Results prior to the long Mkn766 observation yielded no significant rapid correlations of the sort expected. However, the long baseline of the new Mkn 766 observation revealed a strong correlation between the strenth of the ionized component of the Fe line, and that of the hard X-ray continuum flux, confirming our general picture, constraining the size of the emitting region and finally providing a significant step forward in disk modelling.

The new results indicate that the next generation of X-ray satellites will allow us to use reverberation mapping floowing the response of the disk to changes in the X-ray illumination, and finally allowing determination of the physical paremeters of these disks.

On April 11 2006, the paper was accepted for publication in the refereed journal, "Astronomy and Astrophysics". The team members are working on a press release to accompany the publication of the paper

Co-investigators on the project were James Reeves (JHU), Delphine Porquet (MPE, Germany), Kirpal Nandra (Imperial College, U.K.), Michal Dovcia (Astronomical Institute, Prague, Czech Republic) and Steve Kraemer (CUA). 

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