Given the Carnegie Foundation's recent report on poor undergraduate education at research universities, the following tips provide background on undergraduate research at UMBC.

Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day

Thursday, April 30
9 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Albin O. Kuhn Library, 7th Floor

More than 35 students will give oral presentations and display poster exhibits on their research, followed by two faculty lectures on the role of undergraduates in research, and closing reception. A printed program with research abstracts will be available at the event.

Four UMBC Students Awarded Goldwater Scholarships

Four UMBC juniors are among the 316 students nationwide recently awarded a Goldwater Scholarship for the 1998-99 academic year. Named for former Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, it is the premier undergraduate award of its type, given to outstanding students in the fields of mathematics, natural sciences, and engineering. UMBC joins Harvard, Duke, Stanford, Brown, Cornell, and the University of Chicago, among other such prestigious schools, to have all four nominated students selected. The students are Shahla M. Hosseini, a biochemistry major from Kensington, Maryland; Charay Jennings, a biological sciences major from Baltimore; Kimball Martin, a mathematics major from Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania; and Ryan Turner, a biochemistry and molecular biology major from Tyaskin, Maryland.

Undergraduate Helps Solve Structure of HIV Protein

Sophomore biochemistry major Chelsea Stalling recently created the first three-dimensional model of the HIV nucleocapsid protein, and her groundbreaking work was reported in the January 16 issue of Science. Of the dozens of proteins that make up HIV, only seven have been structurally characterized to date, three of them by AIDS researcher Michael Summers and his team of undergraduate and graduate student researchers. Their work is critical to the development of new drugs to halt the devastating virus' replication. Summers, professor of chemistry and biochemistry, is the only Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at a public university in Maryland. Chelsea's achievements are not unique to UMBC students -- the chemistry department recently completed a study that showed over the last five years, 255 students have conducted substantive research in faculty labs, and 70 students have been published in refereed journals.