Kathy Zerrlaut Appointed Chair of NCAA Division I Women's Lax Committee
Associate Director of Athletics Kathy Zerrlaut has been appointed Chair of the NCAA Division I Women's Lacrosse Committee. Zerrlaut replaces Sue Delaney-Sheetz, whose term as a member of the committee has expired.

The Baltimore native has served for two years on the committee, and will beits Chair through the 2005 Championships. The committee is responsible for theDivision I weekly rankings, the selection process for the championships, andother issues related to the conduct of the championships. The 2004 Women'sLacrosse Division I Championships will be held at Princeton University.

Entering her 30th year at UMBC, Zerrlaut will continue as a Division I liaisonon the Rules Committee. She coached volleyball and lacrosse for two decades for the Retrievers and just completed a term on the NCAA Management Council.

Senior Huguens Jean Wins All America Honors
Huguens Jean capped his brilliant senior season by earning All America honors with a fourth place finish in the high jump at the NCAA Men's Track & Field Championships. Jean, who earned a spot in the field as an at-large selection, bested his own school record by two inches with a leap of 7'3 1/4". He finished in a tie for fourth place, earning 4.5 points for UMBC. David Jaworski of USC won the event at 7'5 3/4".

The mark of 7'3 1/4" is believed to be the highest jump by any athlete competing in the state of Maryland. Jean placed tenth in the indoor championships in Fayetteville, AK three months ago. He won the NEC Outdoor Championships with a leap of 7'1 1/4", a mark which qualified him to compete this weekend. He becomes the second Retriever to earn All America honors in two years -- Cleopatra Borel won the indoor shot put title in March of 2002. Jean's coach, David Bobb '99, was UMBC's other Division I All American.

Sophomore Kristie Pickeral and Junior Lauren Hebb Named to All-Star Squad
Kristie Pickeral, NEC's softball Player of the Year, had a .387 batting average in her second year as a Retriever, playing in all 62 games with 77 hits and 59 RBI's. Lauren Hebb, UMBC's starting centerfielder, was a First Team All-Northeast Conference selection, as she batted .368 on the season, while leading the league in home runs with 15. Along with teammate Lisa Boone, both Hebb and Pickeral were chosen as co-MVP's at UMBC's annual varsity awards ceremony. It was the second consecutive season that two Retrievers were selected to the ECAC team.

Ellen Handler Spitz is Awarded Senior Fellowship
Honors College Professor of Visual Arts Ellen Handler Spitz has been awarded a prestigious senior fellowship for the 2003-2004 Rutgers University Center for Children and Childhood Studies Regional Seminar Series. As a senior fellow, she will attend the seminar series and give a talk at one of the seminars (in February 2004).

Policy Sciences Doctoral Student Receives Research Grant
Policy sciences doctoral student John Mulaa has been awarded a research grant from SAGA (Strategies and Analysis for Growth and Access) to conduct his dissertation research, "Social Capital and Education: The Case of Busia: Western Kenya," in Kenya.

May Employees of the Month
Nancy Gunkel, administrative assistant for physical plant; Robert Connelly, multi-trade chief electrician III; Barbara Daniloski, manager, Financial Services; and Lynn Crabb, academic advisor, College of Engineering, have been named UMBC Employees of the Month.

Alumna Paula Durette and Student Jo Israelson Win Rosebud Awards
The 2003 Rosebud "Best of Show" Award went to a film co-created by UMBC student Jo Israelson and fellow filmmakers Jenae Gates and Jozy Dayhof. Alumna Paula Durette also won a Rosebud Award for "Ladies Tea/Nesting Season."

The winners of the 2003 Rosebud Film & Video Festival Competition were announced on Sunday, May 11 at a gala awards ceremony. Now in its 13th year, the Festival seeks to honor the innovative, experimental, unusual and deeply personal in regional film and video making. Through the annual competition, public screenings and cable television showcases, nominees and winners are given many new opportunities for professional exposure. Open only to DC, Maryland and Virginia film and video makers, the Rosebud Festival has become a premiere showcase for emerging artists in the area.

New Patent for Govind Rao and Iordan Kostov
Congratulations to Govind Rao, professor and chair, chemical/biochemical engineering, and Iordan Kostov, research assistant professor, chemical/biochemical engineering, for their patent entitled, "Ratiometric Fluorometer", patent number US 6,563,585 B1,that issued on May 13. This invention relates to an analytic apparatus and particularly to a ratiometric fluorometer for measuring the concentration of various analytes in a sample. The entire patent can be viewed on the United States Patent and Trademark Office's Web site at http://www.uspto.gov. If you would like more information about patents, trademarks, or copyrights, please call the Office of Technology Development at ext. 5-1414.

Oleg Dubovik's Paper Receives "Most Cited" Honors
Congratulations to Oleg Dubovik of UMBC's Goddard Earth Sciences &Technology (GEST) Center. Dubovik's Journal of Atmospheric Science paper "Variability of absorption and optical properties of key aerosol types observed in worldwide locations" was determined by the Thomson-ISI Web of Science database to be one of the most cited recent papers in the field of Geoscience, the second recent paper by Dubovik to earn the distinction.

Vincent Fitzpatrick Wins National Award for Book
A biography written by Vincent Fitzpatrick, adjunct associate professor of English, Gerald W. Johnson: From Southern Liberal to National Conscience (Louisiana State University Press, 2002), has received the Frank Luther Mott-Kappa Tau Alpha Research Award for the best research-based book on journalism/mass communications published in 2002. Click here for more information about the book.

Women's Lacrosse Repeats as NEC Champions
On May 3, freshmen Jenny Kasper and Kelly Fiorani scored three goals apiece as UMBC erased a 7-6 halftime deficit to come away with an 11-9 victory over Mount St. Mary's to claim their second-straight Northeast Conference championship. The Retrievers have played in every NEC final since the 1998 season, walking away with the title in five of the six years. The Retrievers were defeated by the #1 ranked Loyola Greyhounds in the first round of the NCAA Tournament on May 8.

Men's Track and Field Places Third; Women Fourth, at NEC Outdoor Championships
The St. Francis (PA) Red Flash captured the 2003 Northeast Conference Men's Outdoor Track and Field Championships on May 4 at UMBC Stadium. UMBC's men's team placed third and the women's team placed fourth.

UMBC senior Huguens Jean was named the Most Valuable Field Performer after winning gold medals in the High Jump and the Triple Jump. Jean qualified for NCAA Regionals and the IC4A/ECAC Meet after eclipsing his own personal and NEC record in the High Jump with an effort of 7'1.75". He qualified for the IC4A/ECAC Meet with a 47'11" effort in the Triple Jump.

UMBC freshman Adam Grossman won the 100 Meters (10.68, IC4A/ECAC).

Fred Wilson, whose first retrospective was presented by UMBC's Center for Art and Visual Culture in 2001, is representing the United States at this year's Venice Biennale, the leading international exhibition of contemporary art.

Earlier this year, Wilson also received a Distinguished Body of Work Award from the College Art Association for "Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations, 1979-2001," produced by CAVC and curated by Maurice Berger. CAA, the national professional association of visual artists and art institutions, presents the award annually to a single recipient.

A MacArthur Fellow, Wilson is well known internationally for works that address complex issues of race and ethnicity. No stranger to UMBC, he was part of three group exhibitions in the 1990's when CAVC was known as the Fine Arts Gallery, and has also presented three lectures on campus over the last decade.

As a result of the success of UMBC's exhibition, "Objects and Installations" is on a national tour through 2004 that includes Skidmore College, the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Houston, Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Chicago Cultural Center. The New York Times selected the retrospective as one of the 2002-03 art season's highlights.

Through a variety of programs, including exhibitions, lectures, conferences, film series, and visiting and resident artist series, CAVC has established itself as an important venue for an ongoing dialogue about contemporary art and culture. The "Objects and Installations" exhibition and catalog played an important role in evaluating Wilson's work for the Biennale.

Maurice Berger, CAVC curator, says, "One major criterion for selection is a distinguished exhibition history. The retrospective -- for the first time -- comprehensively documented Fred's career. Since of most of his installations are ephemeral, created as they are for the individual institutions they critique, they easily could have been lost to history. The UMBC exhibition recovered these objects by documenting them through words and images, and made them once again available to museum visitors and readers of the catalog. No doubt, as Fred reminded me, the State Department and other interested parties took a long, hard look at the catalog when selecting artists for the Biennale. I'm delighted it served as a surrogate advocate for Fred.

"Were it not for the Center for Art and Visual Culture, the retrospective would not have happened -- at least not for a number of years," adds Berger. "The Center has led in this regard rather than followed. The UMBC community is amazing. I have never worked in such a generative and creative academic environment. I am always amazed at the willingness of my colleagues to take chances, to go out on a limb, to push the envelope. When David Yager, CAVC executive director, asked me in 1990 to work with the gallery, I could never have imagined the truly extraordinary collaborations that would follow. In just a decade -- as the amazing success of "Objects and Installations" affirms, the Center is considered a leader and a model in the world of university museums and galleries."

Symmes Gardner, CAVC director, says the Center's longstanding traveling exhibition programs and catalogs have been successful vehicles for getting the word out about CAVC and about UMBC. "With our major exhibition and publication initiatives, the CAVC has been able to reach a large number of diverse communities across the country. It shows a national audience that UMBC's commitment to research not only includes the arts but champions them as well."

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