UMBC Honors and ACHIEVEMENTS

LEADERSHIP and INNOVATION
UMBC is nationally recognized for its leadership in a variety of innovative programs.

UMBC was ranked number one in the 2010 list of “Up-and-Coming” national universities in the latest U.S. News & World Report America’s Best Colleges Guide. In addition, UMBC also received recognition for being the number one public national university in undergraduate teaching, tied with Stanford at fourth place among all national universities. UMBC also joined Cal Tech, Duke University, Williams College, MIT and others in an unranked list of schools that give students outstanding opportunities for undergraduate research and creative projects. UMBC was also listed on U.S. News & World Report’s Most Student Diversity List

UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, has been named to the prestigious U.S. News & World Report "America's Best Leaders 2008" list. A collaborative effort between U.S. News and Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership, the Best Leaders awards recognize ability to set direction, achieve results and cultivate a culture of growth.

The Princeton Review features UMBC in its new 2008 edition of the Princeton Review Guide: "Best 366 Colleges" and ranks UMBC 2nd on its Diverse Student Populations list. Only 15 percent of four-year colleges in the U.S. and two Canadian colleges were chosen for the book, with "outstanding academics" as the primary

According to Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, UMBC ranks:

- 2nd in the nation in awarding bachelor’s degrees to Asian Americans in
   computer and information sciences

- 10th in the nation in awarding bachelor’s degrees to African Americans in
   biological and biomedical sciences

- 11th in the nation in awarding bachelor’s degrees to African Americans in
   computer and information sciences

- 20th in the nation in awarding bachelor’s degrees to Asian Americans in
   biological and biomedical sciences

- 31st in the nation in awarding bachelor’s degrees to African Americans in
   engineering

The university’s Alex. Brown Center for Entrepreneurship received $2 million from the Kauffman Foundation to build entrepreneurship education across the campus. The mission of the Kauffman Campuses Initiative is to catalyze entrepreneurship programs outside of business and engineering schools. The award acknowledges the success of UMBC's Alex. Brown Center for Entrepreneurship, created six years ago through a gift of $1 million from the Alex. Brown Foundation to develop a leading university entrepreneurship center for the Baltimore region.

The Center for History Education has received seven $1 million grants from the US. Department of Education’s Teaching American History Grant Program to invigorate the teaching of history in Maryland elementary, middle and high schools.

The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded a $400,000 grant to UMBC to help fund a Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture project about media images and the civil rights movement. The project is a traveling exhibit titled "For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights.” Maurice Berger, senior research scholar of CADVC, was the curator and principle investigator for the project.

The Meyerhoff Scholarship Program is a national model for preparing students of all backgrounds for careers in science and engineering-related fields. Meyerhoff Scholars are twice as likely to graduate with a science or engineering major than students who decline the scholarship offer. Their GPAs in science, math and engineering are higher, and they are significantly more likely to enroll in a graduate program in these fields. Currently, 200 Meyerhoff alumni have completed graduate degrees, and 250 more are in graduate and professional programs.   

The National Science Foundation awarded UMBC a $2.9 million grant in 2006 to establish an innovative interdisciplinary doctoral training program in “Water in the Urban Environment.” The award places UMBC among the most visible universities carrying out high-level research and doctoral training in urban environmental issues.

UMBC’s ADVANCE program is the catalyst for increasing the number of women university faculty in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. The University's ADVANCE program, funded by the National Science Foundation, has helped to increase the number of female tenured and tenure-track STEM faculty at UMBC by 50 percent over the past five years.

Continuing and Professional Studies won a Gold Level Marketing and Publications Award in 2009 from the University Continuing Education Association, selected specifically for the print recruitment campaign for UMBC at the Universities at Shady Grove.

UMBC received the 2008 President's Award for Client of the Year from the Baltimore Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. The award is given annually by the local chapter to a client to recognize their ongoing patronage of design through architecture in the Baltimore region. It recognizes contributions by UMBC's Planning and Construction Services team to the USGS and multi-tenant buildings at bwtech@UMBC Research and Technology Park.

From the New Media Studio, Bill Shewbridge, Paul Iwancio and Aaron Weidele were honored with a 2008 Centers of Excellence Award by the New Media Consortium for "leadership in capturing and disseminating digital stories across the institution."

College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences

Barry Lanman, professor of historical studies, was honored as the 2008 winner of The Postsecondary Teaching Award of the Oral History Association. The award recognizes a “distinguished postsecondary educator involved in undergraduate, graduate, continuing, or professional education who has incorporated the practice of oral history in the classroom in an exemplary way.”

Nicholas Miller, professor of political science, has been elected president of the Public Choice Society and will be responsible for organizing its 2009 and 2010 annual meetings. He has also been designated editor of Games and Political Behavior that is part of the newly-established political science network component of the Social Science Research Network (SSRN).

Marvin Mandell, professor of public policy, assumed the presidency of the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA) at their 2008 Annual Conference in December. NASPAA promotes excellence in public service education.

The UMBC Department of Public Policy is one of only three National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA) accredited programs in Maryland.

Xerxes Mehta was named Baltimore's "Best Theater Director" in 2008 by the Baltimore City Paper.

College of Engineering and Information Technology

The chemical and biochemical engineering department is ranked first in the nation in percentage of women faculty. The department is 57.1% female and includes four tenured/tenure track females.

The university has joined with Princeton to create a new Engineering Research Center (ERC) expected to revolutionize optics. The ERC is one of a select number of interdisciplinary centers located at universities across the U.S. UMBC’s optics expert, Anthony Johnson, professor of physics and computer science and electrical engineering, is the deputy director.

A collaboration between UMBC and IBM created The Multicore Computing Center (MC2), a unique facility that will focus on supercomputing research related to aerospace/defense, financial services, medical imaging and weather/climate change prediction. IBM awarded UMBC a significant gift to support the development of this new center, which researchers describe as an “orchestra” of one of the world’s most powerful supercomputing chips.

Through a $2.5 million National Science Foundation PROMISE grant, UMBC leads an effort by Maryland’s three public research universities to increase the number and diversity of Ph.D. graduates in the sciences and engineering who go on to academic careers.

The University is among the top three Ph.D-granting universities in the U.S. in the production of IT degrees at the undergraduate, master’s and doctoral levels, according to the National Science Foundation (NSF). According to current NSF education data, UMBC ranks second in degrees awarded by U.S. colleges that grant bachelor's, master's and Ph.D. degrees in the computing sciences. UMBC continues to be the largest producer of IT graduates in the Maryland area, according to the NSF.

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

UMBC has been designated a National Center for Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Research for 2008-2013.

UMBC researchers are leading a six-university team on a $7.5-million, five-year Multi-Disciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) grant from the U.S. Department of Defense. The UMBC group, collaborating with colleagues from Purdue, the University of Illinois, University of Michigan, and University of Texas at Dallas and San Antonio, is working to translate recommendations by the 9-11 Commission for more effectively sharing classified information into a technology network that both works and is secure. 

College of Natural and Mathematical Sciences

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has chosen UMBC as part of a collaborative network of 12 colleges and universities to teach a new, hands-on genomic course aimed at involving more U.S. first-year college students in authentic research. HHMI received 44 applications and selected 12 institutions for the initiative, the first from its Science Education Alliance.

*Last updated 6/16/2009