1. UMBC has 10 National Science Foundation Career Awardees—young faculty who show great promise to become the leading researchers and educators in their fields—an outstanding number for a university of our size. The recipients are in biochemical engineering (2), chemistry (3), computer science and electrical engineering (4), and information systems (1).

2. UMBC ranks 16th nationally in NASA funding. In addition to funding individual faculty research projects, NASA supports two major research centers at UMBC: The Goddard Earth Sciences and Technology Center, a research consortium headed by UMBC and established in 2000, and The Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology, which was established in 1995 and focuses on remote sensing technology and atmospheric research.

3. UMBC undergraduates have extensive opportunities to contribute to faculty research. During the past 10 years, several hundred undergraduates have co-authored papers published in such leading research journals as Science, The Journal of Molecular Biology, Nature Structural Biology, and The Journal of the American Chemical Society.

4. Using new technologies to study the past, UMBC historian Anne Rubin and her colleagues from the University of Virginia won the first E-Lincoln Prize for a high-tech approach to Civil War research—Valley of the Shadow, a Web site/book/CD-ROM project.

5. UMBC’s new interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in gerontology is one of only six in the nation. It brings together more than 50 faculty, drawn from economics, emergency health services, policy sciences, psychology, and sociology and anthropology and from the professional schools at the University of Maryland, Baltimore.

6. During the past decade, UMBC’s photonics and optics research programs have developed into some of the nation’s best. A new, NASA-funded Center for Advanced Studies in Photonics Research builds on UMBC’s strengths in this area.

7. A device invented by mechanical engineering professor Uri Tasch that detects lameness in dairy cattle (a condition not easily observed by the naked eye) has been licensed for development by a New Zealand-based firm in a deal that could save the global dairy industry millions of dollars annually.

8. The Center for Health Program Development and Management, UMBC’s partnership with Maryland’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, has helped the State lower costs, increase efficiency, and improve the quality of health care in Maryland.

9. UMBC was selected as headquarters of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, one of only two National Science Foundation-sponsored Urban Long-Term Ecological Research sites in the United States. The University also received funding from the Environmental Protection Agency to establish UMBC’s Center
for Urban Environmental Research
and Education.

10. UMBC received the Council of Graduate Schools/Peterson’s Award for Innovation in Promoting an Inclusive Graduate Community, in recognition of our efforts to build a comprehensive, supportive environment for women and minority graduate students. Our initiatives in this area include the Graduate Horizons Program to recruit new students and the Meyerhoff Graduate Fellows Program in the Biomedical Sciences, which is modeled on UMBC’s nationally acclaimed undergraduate Meyerhoff Scholars Program.