Janet Antoine Lumpkin was one of the nation’s first African-American female faculty members in the chemical engineering field.

Dr. Lumpkin joined UMBC in 1991 and brought her skills to bear on understanding the mechanisms and kinetics involved in protein stability. She passed away in 1997.

The department honors her memory each year with a memorial lecture, attracting as speakers some of the field’s most pre-eminent scholars and practioners, including Daniel Wang, David Tirrell and Leroy Hood. The lecture is part of UMBC’s Life Science Symposium, “A Look Ahead.”

The Lumpkin Memorial Lecture has been fortunate to attract some of the field's most prominent scholars and practioners as speakers.

Dr. George Georgiou
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology
The University of Texas at Austin

Dr. E. Albert Reece
Dean, University of Maryland School of Medicine
University of Maryland, Baltimore

Dr. David Tirrell
Chair, Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering
California Institute of Technology

Dr. Laura Kiessling
Department of Chemistry and Department of Biochemistry
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Dr. Gregory Stephanopoulos
Bayer Professor of Chemical Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Dr. Leroy Hood
Institute for Systems Biology

Dr. Barry Buckland
Merck & Co. Inc.

Dr. Sangtae Kim
Donald W. Feddersen Distinguished Professor
Purdue University

Dr. Douglas A. Lauffenburger
Professor of Chemical Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Dr. Daniel I.C. Wang
Institute Professor of Chemical Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Dr. Arthur Humphrey
Professor of Chemical Engineering
Pennsylvania State University