UMBC Honors and ACHIEVEMENTS

FACULTY Achievements
In head-to-head comparisons with top scholars across the nation, UMBC faculty compete at the top level of research and scholarship.

UMBC ranks 76th in the nation for prestigious faculty awards, including a Mellon Research Fellow, a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, a Guggenheim Fellow in the humanities and a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellow in the social sciences.

Books by faculty members are published by such prestigious presses as Harvard University Press, Oxford University Press, Cornell University Press and Simon & Schuster. Recent faculty books include: A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland by Kate Brown, assistant professor of history; Never Married: Single Women in Early Modern England by Amy Froide, associate professor of history; and Charles Darwin, Geologist by Sandra Herbert, professor of history; and Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South by Thomas Schaller, associate professor of political science.

College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences

Scott Farrow, professor and chair of economics, received a $200,000 MacArthur Foundation grant to launch the journal of the new Society of Benefit-Cost Analysis.

Thomas Field, professor of modern languages, linguistic and intercultural communication, has been named the UMBC Lipitz Professor of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences for 2009-10. This professorship is supported by an endowment created by Roger C. Lipitz and the Lipitz Family Foundation "to recognize and support innovative and distinguished teaching and research in the arts, humanities and social sciences at the UMBC."

Assistant Professor of Public Policy Lisa Dickson has been selected as a fellow of the Association for the Study of Higher Education.

Associate Professor of Sociology Marina Adler received the Donald Creighton Memorial Award for Outstanding Faculty from the Graduate Student Association.

Associate Professor Brian J. Maguire won a 2009 Fulbright Scholarship. Maguire will spend four months in Australia studying occupational risks among ambulance personnel, and he will also teach at three Australian universities. His previous research projects were the first to document the occupational injury and fatality rates among emergency medical services personnel in the U.S.

Associate Professor of History Kate Brown has been selected for Guggenheim Fellowship.

Short experimental films by Fred Worden, assistant professor in the Department of Visual Arts, were accepted and screened at the Rotterdam International Film Festival and screened January 2009. His film, “1859,” won the Jury’s Choice First Prize in the Black Maria Film and Video Festival.

Works by Eric Dyer, assistant professor in the Department of Visual Arts, gained international recognition in 2009. His film "Copenhagen Cycles" was shown at the 11th International Cairo Biennale (Cairo, Egypt) in December 2008 and at the 6th Biennial Tehran International Animation Festival (Tehran, Iran) in March 2009. From January 2009 through January 2010, his work "Bellows," an installation using painted 3-D prints and live video, will be on display at the Neue Bilder vom Menschen (New Images from Humans) exhibition at ARS ELECTRONICA in Linz, Austria.

Associate Professor Cathy Cook's feature-length film "Immortal Cupboard: In Search of Lorine Niedecker" was one of four winners of this year's Wisconsin Own Jury Prize at the 2009 Wisconsin Film Festival.

Robert H. Deluty, associate dean of the Graduate School, received the Maryland Psychological Association of Graduate Students' 2009 MPAGS Award "for outstanding dedication to graduate student growth and progress."

Assistant Professor of Education Patricia A. Young published Instructional Design Frameworks and Intercultural Model, a book that meets the needs of practitioners and researchers by providing frameworks for integrating culture into design.

Several faculty and students received Individual Artist Awardsfrom the Maryland State Arts Council. Winners include Visual Arts Assistant Professor Calla Thompson, Chair and Professor of Dance Carol Hess and Music Professor Stuart Saunders Smith.

Ellen Handler Spitz, professor of visual arts and an Honors College faculty member, served as guest editor for the Journal of Aesthetic Education. The topic of the issue is children’s literature and will be published in summer 2009. The issue is being submitted

Director of the Department of Media and Communication Studies and Associate Professor of American Studies Jason Loviglio won the University System of Maryland Board of Regents’ Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching for 2009-10.

Amy Froide, professor of history, received the 2008 Huntington Library Fellowship Award.

Marvin Mandell, chair and professor of public policy, was elected vice president and president-elect of the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs & Administration. 

Piotr Gwiazda, associate professor of English, was writer-in-residence at the James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut. He spent the 2008 fall semester pursuing creative writing and researching his book on U.S. poetry in the era of globalization.

Kate Brown, associate professor of history, received the 2008 Kennan Institute Research Scholarshipfrom the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Brian Grodsky, assistant professor of political science, received a 2008 East European Studies Center Award from the Woodrow Wilson Center.

Zena Hitz, assistant professor of philosophy, received a 2008 Harvard University Center for the Hellenic Studies Fellowship.

Two Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture publications designed by Franc Nunoo-Quarcoo, professor and chair of visual arts, were selected by the American Institute of Graphic Design (AIGA) for its 2008 Fifty Books / Fifty Covers award. The award is the highest honor the AIGA bestows for: book design and production. It is extremely rare for one institution to receive two awards in this category in the same year. The publications are Andrea Robbins and Max Becher: Portraits and The 1980s: A Virtual Discussion. Fifty Books / Fifty Covers is scheduled to travel nationally.

A production directed by Colette Searls, assistant professor of theatre, was nominated for several 2008 Helen Hayes Awards. Vigils, performed at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, was nominated for Outstanding Lead Actress, Outstanding Supporting Actor, Outstanding Sound Design and the Canadian Embassy Award for Outstanding Ensemble.

Assistant Professor of Music Airi Yoshioka was honored with the McGraw-Hill Companies’ 2007 Robert Sherman Award for Music Education and Community Outreach. The $10,000 award recognizes outstanding musicianship and included a program of her live performances on prominent New York City classical music station WQXR.

From the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics, Assistant Professor Isabel Galindo received the Maryland Higher Education Commission’s Henry C. Welcome Fellowship.

From the visual arts program, Professor John Sturgeon became UMBC’s second Lipitz Professor of the Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences.

Bruce Walz, professor and chair of emergency health services, was elected president of Advocates for EMS in 2008.

Elena Zlotescu, associate professor of theatre, was named Best Costume Designer by Baltimore City Paper. Zlotescu has been the resident costume designer for more than 20 years for UMBC’s theatre and dance productions.

College of Engineering and Information Technology

A UMBC research team led by Anupam Joshi and Tim Finin, both computer science professors, received an award from the National Science Foundation for a four-year project, “Platys: From Position to Place in Next Generation Networks,” that will explore how advances in mobile technology and networking can support systems that understand and adapt their behavior to their user’s context, activities and preferences. Platys is a collaborative research project between UMBC and groups at North Carolina State and Duke Universities. The group will share $1.8 million dollars in research funding from NSF’s Network Science and Engineering program.

Tim Finin, professor of information technology, was one of four recipients of the 2009 IEEE Computer Society’s Technical Achievement Awards. His award was for “pioneering contributions to distributed intelligent systems.”

Professor of the Practice of Chemical Engineering and Undergraduate Program Director Taryn Bayles won the University System of Maryland Board of Regents’ Faculty Award for Excellence in Mentoring for 2009-2010.

Gary Carter, professor of computer science and electrical engineering, has been elevated to a IEEE Fellow for “contributions to understanding nonlinear and polarization effects in optical fiber communication systems,” effective January 2009.

Associate Professor of Computer Science Hillol Kargupta received the 2008 IBM Innovation Award for his work on distributed data stream mining.

Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Curtis Menyuk has been elected a fellow of the American Physical Society. His research interests lie at the intersection of engineering, physics, applied mathematics and computational methods.

Anne Spence, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, received the 2008 Outstanding Change Agent Award of Excellence from the Maryland State Department of Education.

Tim Topoleski, professor of mechanical engineering, was recognized as the Presidential Teaching Professor 2008-11.

Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Ramachandra Hosmane won the 2009 Presidential Teaching Professor Award for 2009-12. Tim Topoleski, professor of mechanical engineering, was recognized as the 2008 Presidential Teaching Professor 2008-11.

Julia Ross, professor and chair of chemical and biochemical engineering, and Tulay Adali, professor of computer science and electrical engineering, were elected American Institute for Medical & Biological Engineering Fellows in 2007.

Professor of Mechanical Engineering Shlomo Carmi was honored with a 2008 lifetime achievement award from the District of Columbia Council of Engineering and Architectural Societies. The Council recognized Carmi's distinguished, 38-year academic and research career. He also serves on the Board of Governors of the American Society of Mechanical Engineering.

Govind Rao, professor of chemical and biochemical engineering and director of the Center for Advanced Sensor Technology (CAST), was elected American Association for the Advancement of Science fellow for innovative research in the field of optical sensors, which has led to a paradigm shift in bioprocessing applications.

Tulay Adali, professor of computer science and electrical engineering, was elected fellow of the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers (IEEE) "for contributions to nonlinear and complex-valued statistical signal processing."

Claire Welty, director of the Center for Urban Environmental Research and Education and professor of civil and environmental engineering, chairs the Water Science and Technology Board’s study on “Reducing Stormwater Discharge Contributions to Water Pollution.”

Haijun Su, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, received a $400,000 five-year National Science Foundation Career Award for his project titled, "A Theoretical Framework for the Conceptual Design of Compliant Systems."

College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences

Associate Professor of Mathematics Anindya Roy has been appointed an associate editor for the Journal of American Statistical Association, the flagship publication of the American Statistical Association. The new editorial board’s tenure is 2010-12.

Michael Summers, professor of chemistry and biochemistry, is one of only two Howard Hughes Medical Investigators at Maryland public universities. Summers is conducting groundbreaking AIDS research with both undergraduate and graduate students. He is the recipient of a 2000 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering.

Senior Lecturer of Mathematics and Statistics Bonnie Tighe was the recipient of the2009 Carl Weber Excellence in Science and Mathematics Teaching Award.

Professor of Biological Sciences Thomas Cronin won the UMBC Presidential Research Professor Award for 2009-12.

In the Department of Biological Sciences, Tamra Mendelson, assistant professor, and Hua Lu, assistant professor, received 2008 NSF Career Advancement Awards, and Jeff Leips, associate professor, received a 2008 Geneticist-Educator Network of Alliances (GENA) certification from the American Society of Human Genetics.

Marie-Christine Daniel, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry, received the American Association for Cancer Research-Pancreatic Cancer Action Network’s 2008 Career Development Award.

Thomas Matthew, professor of mathematics and statistics, was recognized as 2008 Presidential Teaching and Research Professor.

In the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Professor Andrew Rukhin received the American Statistical Association’s 2008 W.J. Youden Award in Interlaboratory Testing, Associate Professor Anindya Roy received the 2008 Outstanding Young Statistician Awardfrom the International Indian Statisticians Association and Chair and Professor Nagaraj Neerchal received the 2008 Outstanding Service Recognition Award from the Maryland Chapter of the American Statistical Association.

Dan Fabris, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry, is one of just 14 researchers nationally to receive a 2006 NIH National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) High-End Instrumentation grant. The $1.5 million grant funded the purchase of a 12 Tesla Q-FTICR, a powerful, high-resolution instrument for analysis of nucleic acids and protein-nucleic acid complexes. UMBC will be one of a handful of U.S. locations to own this type instrument, which supports our research on drug resistance by HIV-1 and other retroviruses, and could lead to the development of new and more effective inhibitor drugs for AIDS therapy.

Ray Hoff, professor of physics and director of the NASA-UMBC research centers JCET and GEST, was named a fellow of the American Meteorological Society in 2008.

Robert Reno, associate professor of physics, was named Presidential Teaching Professor, 2007-2010, for his commitment to promoting and recognizing outstanding teaching. Reno introduced a variant of Eric Mazur’s “Peer Instruction,” which encourages active learning by replacing traditional lectures with pre-class readings and in-class discussions. His work in the teaching and testing of conceptual understanding represents one of the first implementations of group learning at UMBC and the first in the Department of Physics.

Phillip Sokolove, professor of biological sciences, was named Presidential Teaching Professor, 2006-09, for contributing significantly to improving the quality of teaching and learning at UMBC. Sokolove is the first faculty member to introduce the use of wireless microphones in large classrooms and one of the first two to use an electronic “clicker” system that allows students to respond anonymously to questions asked during lectures to assess their understanding of key concepts.

Joel Liebman, professor of chemistry and biochemistry, was named Presidential Research Professor, 2006-09, for excellence in organic, inorganic and physical chemistry research. A faculty member since 1972, Liebman has co-authored or co-edited over 380 publications, and also co-authored several chapters of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Chemistry WebBook, the primary ongoing electronic database of chemical information.

In 2006, Professor of Biological Sciences Suzanne Ostrand-Rosenberg was one of 15 Marylanders appointed to serve on the Maryland Stem Cell Research Commission. 

School of Social Work

Carolyn Tice, associate dean and program chair, social work, was a 2008 Fulbright senior specialist in Mongolia.

Erickson School

Bill Thomas, a professor in the Erickson School, received the American College of Health Care Administrators’ 2008 Public Service Award.

*Last updated 6/16/2009