H A R RY P OT T E R S H OV E D A S I D E I N Q U I D D I TC H 8 U M D ’S F I R ST ST U D E N T- S P O N S O R E D G U I D E D O G 32 F R O M I N C A R C E R AT E D TO I N D E M A N D A S P O E T 3 6
W I N T E R 2 0 2 0 / CO N N EC T I N G T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F M A RY L A N D CO M M U N I T Y
GROWING BEYOND MEAT W I T H P L A N T- B A S E D PROTEIN, ETH A N BROW N M . P. M . ’ 9 7 S E T S O U T T O C H A N G E A M E R I C A’ S E AT I NG H A BI T S —A N D M A Y B E S AV E T H E W O R L D 24
ROOM(S) TO GROW
Collaboration comes easy for students in Associate Clinical Professor James Green’s course on entrepreneurship. It’s taught in the Edward St. John Learning and Teaching Center in a “6Round,” one of the four types of TERP (Teach, Engage, Respond and
Participate) classrooms that promote teamwork through flexible seating and beefed-up technology. UMD debuted its first such room in 2013; they now total 52 across campus and are scheduled to reach 70 by 2022. Take a tour of all four TERP classroom types at terp.umd.edu. Photo by John T. Consoli
ON THE MALL
ALUMNI NEWS
06 Getting the Hall Rolling 07 Plans Unveiled for Basketball Performance Center 07 Tunnel Vision CAMPUS LIFE
08 Harry Potter, Shoved Aside 10 Fostering Community 11 Diamondback to End Century-plus Print Run 11 An Activist’s Art 12 A Home for the Public Good 13 Live From College Park! 14 Tall Tale 15 Sports Briefs EXPLORATIONS
16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23
The Page Turner Street-level Cool Cloudy With a Chance of Microbes Scales of Success As the World Turns Tackling Parental ADHD to Help Kids Information Pump The Big Question 42 44 45 46 48
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T E R P. U M D . E D U
Alumni Association Man-to-Man Coverage Class Notes Found in Space From the Archives
FEATURES
ONLINE
From Maryland to Marooned Thirty-nine days, 20 people, one survivor … and two Terps. Meet the Maryland alums who competed this fall on the CBS reality show stalwart “Survivor: Island of the Idols.”
—
A Fresh Game to Relish Pickleball might sound like a vinegary garnish, but top pro Ben Johns ’22 can vouch the sport’s for real. He teamed up with RecWell to introduce it as an intramural option last fall.
—
Golf Balls and Grapevines The University of Maryland Extension and Montgomery County planted a mini vineyard on a local golf course to help prepare aspiring winemakers. 24
Growing Beyond Meat With plant-based protein, Ethan Brown M.P.M. ’97 sets out to change America’s eating habits—and maybe save the world.
32
BY CHRIS CARROLL
Oh, the Places You’ll Sniff! Guide dogs undergo months of training before they’re ready to assist visually impaired handlers. For UMD’s first studentsponsored pup, class is in session. BY ANNIE DANKELSON
36
A Life of Sentences An armed carjacking at age 16 sent Reginald Dwayne Betts ’09 to prison— and started his remarkable path to the worlds of literature and law. BY SALA LEVIN ’10
O P P O S I T E P A G E : P H O T O S B Y J O H N T. C O N S O L I ; C O L L A G E B Y R O M A R E B E A R D E N / L I C E N S E D B Y V A G A . T H I S PAG E : P U P PY P H OTO BY ST E P H A N I E S . CO R D L E ; “ S U RV I VO R ” P H OTO S BY R O B E RT VO E TS/C B S
Get the latest on the UMD community by visiting TERP.UMD.EDU.
TRANSFORM THE STUDENT EXPERIENCE
Fearless Ideas Every issue of Terp features examples of how UMD transforms the student experience. In this issue, we further highlight those stories with a “ .” We’ll do the same in future issues on our efforts to turn imagination into innovation, discover new knowledge and inspire Maryland pride.
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FROM THE EDITOR
when co-workers here recently chatted about their favorite winter activities, two younger colleagues enthusiastically suggested snowboarding. A couple of parents said sledding or building snowmen with their little ones. I said reading on the sofa near the fireplace, snuggled in an afghan and wearing my slippers. There’s not much I love more than reading. As a kid riding home in the back seat from my grandma’s apartment, I’d try to catch one sentence at a time in my Encyclopedia Brown book as our old Toyota Tercel passed under each streetlight. In high school, I’d hold a paperback at face level as I walked down the hall, mindlessly expecting the sea of teens in my path to part. I cleverly found a career that allows me to read much of the day, then I go home and spend my last few minutes before bed knocking back a few pages in my latest novel. (Sure, doctor, my eyes are fine.) And once a month, my neighborhood book club gets together to debate the merits of what we just read, and what we should tackle next. So naturally I’m envious of Deborah Taylor ’73, M.L.S. ’74, a retired librarian and a lecturer in Maryland’s College of Information Studies. She’s spent decades reading and evaluating books for children and young adults and recommending the best of them. In November, she helped select the 2019 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. What power Taylor has, and what a force for good! I was delighted not long ago when I got a text from a friend, saying thanks for recommending a new novel; imagine that amplified exponentially. When mapping out each issue of Terp, I think about what stories will delight, inform and entertain readers. Here’s hoping you’ll be inspired by another literary journey, that of Reginald Dwayne Betts ’09, who spent nine years in prison for a carjacking, then became a reflective and acclaimed poet now pursuing a second law degree at Yale. We also caught up with the visionary Ethan Brown M.P.M. ’97, founder of Beyond Meat, whose plant-based products are suddenly everywhere, from your supermarket and favorite sit-down restaurants to Dunkin’. He’s at the center of a national conversation about what meat is and whether plant-based options are better for health and the environment. Plus, we’ve got a feature about an adorable guide dog in training at UMD. Two words: puppy pics. I’m feeling confident you’re going to like it all. So I’m rewarding myself— with a trip to the library.
Lauren Brown University Editor
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Publisher JACKIE LEWIS Vice President, University Relations
Advisers JOEL R. SELIGMAN Associate Vice President, Strategic Communications MARGARET HALL Chief Creative Officer
Magazine Staff LAUREN BROWN University Editor JOHN T. CONSOLI ’86 Creative Director VALERIE MORGAN Art Director CHRIS CARROLL ANNIE DANKELSON LIAM FARRELL SALA LEVIN ’10 Writers JASON A. KEISLING RYUMI SUNG Designers STEPHANIE S. CORDLE Photographer GAIL RUPERT M.L.S. ’10 Photography Archivist EMMA HOWELLS Photography Assistant JAGU CORNISH Production Manager DAN NOVAK M.JOUR ’20 MAYA POTTIGER ’17, M.JOUR ‘20 Graduate Assistants KOLIN BEHRENS ’20 LINDSEY COLLINS ’20 CHRIS WRIGHT ’19 Interns
EMAIL terpfeedback@umd.edu ONLINE terp.umd.edu NEWS umdrightnow.umd.edu FACEBOOK.COM/ UnivofMaryland TWITTER.COM/UofMaryland VIMEO.COM/umd YOUTUBE.COM/UMD2101 The University of Maryland, College Park is an equal opportunity institution with respect to both education and employment. University policies, programs and activities are in conformance with pertinent federal and state laws and regulations on non-discrimination regarding race, color, religion, age, national origin, political affiliation, gender, sexual orientation or disability.
COVER Illustration by Jon Stich
INTERPLAY
Thank you so much for the recent article on Andrea Chamblee. I cried as I read her plight. I am group leader for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America in Polk County, Fla. Gun violence prevention is my go-to cause. Please tell Andrea that she can contact me at any time. —LEANDER AULISIO M.S. ’81, LAKELAND, FLA.
The Nazi Reactor That Wasn’t
Remembering a Residential Resolution
What a great reminder of the times in the late ’60s and early ’70s. The cohabitation of female and male students would not have happened had it not been for a group that convinced the administration several years earlier that men and women could visit with each other in the dorms but under strict provisions, like the door having to remain open. A matchbook became the yardstick for the door being “open.” Dean Gray was extremely resistant to this proposal, which became known as “parietal hours.” How do I remember? I was there both as the first undergraduate to become a residence hall “grad” student supervisor and with the SGA. Boy, those were the days. —V. RAYMOND FERRARA ’70, BELLEAIR, FLA.
Just a quick note to thank you for the article regarding the rules we had to observe back in the day in women’s dorms at Maryland. It took me down memory lane. “Draconian” was a very apt way to describe the rules. Needless to say, we chafed under them, as we felt they were too restrictive for women who could vote and legally purchase a drink. But we had
no choice but to follow them. Protesting was unheard of then and probably would have resulted in us no longer being a student! Again, thanks for the laugh remembering the restrictions! —MARTHA M. BORON ’60, CANTON, MICH.
Homeownership Program Builds Greater College Park Community
It’s a fabulous way to strengthen and build the community in a tangible way that reduces traffic, provides strong community bonds and creates a live here, work here mentality. —MORGAN GALE, SILVER SPRING, MD., VIA FACEBOOK
Absurdity of Her Days
One thing that I find most discouraging about the gun violence is our inability as a society to even have a civil conversation about gun violence. Some people seem to be focused on what they might lose from a solution to the madness, without any thought given to what we all might gain from living in a safer nation. There must be a way to build bridges to find a solution. We cannot give up.
A very interesting item is missing from the article about Hitler’s failed attempt to create an atomic bomb. I cannot be sure of its truth, but a detail in your item supports it, as does Wikipedia. The person in charge of the project was Werner Heisenberg (famous for the uncertainty principle). He calculated that the amount of U235 needed to create an atom bomb was roughly one ton ... 10 times the amount estimated by the U.S./British teams! This would have been such a large amount that to proceed, the Germans would have had to put all other activities on the back burner. So they put the bomb on the back burner. The Terp article says that so many of the uranium cubes were made that if all the little cubes had been put together in a single site, it could have resulted in a functional reactor of the type that was built under the building on the University of Chicago. No one really knows if Heisenberg made the error deliberately; much has been written on this topic. —BETTE M. WINER PH.D. ’69, CHESTNUT HILL, MASS.
WRITE TO US We love to hear from readers. Send your feedback, insights, compliments—and, yes, complaints—to terpfeedback@umd.edu or Terp magazine Office of Strategic Communications 7736 Baltimore Ave. College Park, MD 20742
—TIMOTHY DIXON ’80, ELLICOTT CITY, MD.
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NEWS
Getting the Hall Rolling New Discovery District Venue to Combine the Creative and Culinary
oncerts and gymkana performances in the evening. Lectures and yoga classes on weekdays. Tailgate parties and e-sports competitions on the weekends. Good food all the time. That’s the lively mix of activity expected at the Hall CP, an 8,000-square-foot multipurpose space and restaurant that opened in January behind the Hotel at the University of Maryland in UMD’s Discovery District. The Hall CP is a powerful new anchor for Greater College Park, the $2 billion redevelopment of the Baltimore Avenue corridor designed to make the community a vibrant place to work, live and play.
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Scott Plank ’88, owner of the Baltimorebased development firm War Horse, envisions a magnet for creativity in the arts, technology and entrepreneurship. “It’s a venue that we hope to activate like a college campus—there’s always someone awake or doing something,” he says. Located in a radically transformed former car wash and garage for university vehicles, the building features high-tech lighting and sound systems to accommodate a variety of events. The restaurant is run by Chad Gauss, owner and executive chef of the Food Market in Baltimore, and Dennis Sharoky, CEO of the Coal Fire restaurant group, which mixes grab-and-go food with the finer dining of a sit-down restaurant. The 13,000-square-foot backyard will have flexible open space plus ping-pong and cornhole, while the university is building an adjacent pocket park with seating, swings and gazebos. Plank, a former Under Armour executive whose brother is company founder Kevin Plank ’96, brought on a full-time programmer at the Hall to book outdoor and indoor events, community meetings, block parties,
live-streamed conversations and more. “One of the reasons we’re so excited to partner with Scott is there are many innovation districts where there is one building drawn in as the center of activity,” says Ken Ulman, the university’s chief officer for economic development. “But it’s much harder to program the activities to create a ‘sticky’ situation for the community.” The Hall CP dramatically alters the identity of Discovery District West, now home to the Hotel, a WeWork co-working space, and tech startups and incubators, says UMD President Wallace D. Loh. “To have a Discovery District as the hub for innovation, research and economic development, you have to have amenities to attract people, much of which has not existed here,” he says. “Now, the whole center of gravity of campus is going to shift: one traditional center at the Stamp, and the Hall down here.” Amenities like the Hall, the Hotel and the coming light-rail Purple Line are critical to avoiding “brain drain”—new UMD alumni leaving the area, Plank adds. “We want every Maryland grad to settle here and drive the culture and economy.”—lb
R E N D E R I N G CO U RT ESY O F WA R H O R S E C I T I ES
Tunnel Vision
New Team Entrance Honors Longtime Terps Supporter and supporter of Maryland athletics, Mark Butler looked forward to catching UMD teams in action anytime he could. Though the president and CEO of Ollie’s Bargain Outlet and trustee for the university’s foundation died in November, he’ll continue to have a presence at Maryland Stadium. Starting this fall, student-athletes have taken the field through a dramatic new, turtle-shaped tunnel that bears his name. “We all wanted it to be that special, iconic point,” Butler said in a September interview. Butler grew up in Pennsylvania and didn’t attend college before becoming one of four co-founders of the first Ollie’s discount store in 1982. (They now number 345.) The passion and pride of ACC basketball captured his imagination, however, and it didn’t take many trips to Cole Field House before his allegiances shifted from the North Carolina Tar Heels to the Terps. “There was no other sports feeling like being in Cole Field House for a Duke game,” Butler said. The tunnel was named in recognition of his $5 million gift for the Cole Field House project. While Cole will have upgraded athletic amenities such as new weight and locker rooms, practice fields, dining facilities and a sports medicine area, Butler was impressed with its broader applications, such as spaces for innovation programs and entrepreneurs, and a new Center for Brain Health and Human Performance. “The entire student body will be able to benefit,” he said.—LF AS A LONGTIME FAN
Plans Unveiled for Basketball Performance Center MARYLAND ATHLETICS has launched
a fundraising campaign to build a basketball
Sanders ’72 helping to drive the effort. Construction on the 60,000-square-foot
practice facility for its men’s and women’s
facility is expected to take 36 months once
teams.
fully funded.
The $36 million Basketball Performance Center will be adjacent to the Xfinity Center
UMD is the only Big Ten Conference school
without a dedicated practice facility for both
and feature two full-size practice courts, a
basketball teams. Coaches hope the new
strength and conditioning facility, locker
center will alleviate scheduling conflicts at
rooms, lounges, sports medicine facilities
Xfinity’s main court, expand some Olympic
and office space.
sports, accommodate more events and
“(This facility) will usher in a new era of success for basketball,” Athletic Director Damon
shows, and give Maryland a competitive edge in recruiting.
Evans said at an October news conference.
“With both programs, we’ve been able
The project is supported by donors and
to attract the best players in the country
other Athletics revenues. The athletic
year in and year out,” women’s Head Coach
department raised $20 million toward
Brenda Freese said. “To be able to layer that
the building by December, with longtime
with one of the best practice facilities (makes
Maryland basketball supporter Harvey
it a) very, very exciting day.”—AD
T U N N E L P H O T O B Y J O H N T. C O N S O L I ; R E N D E R I N G C O U R T E SY O F M A R Y L A N D AT H L E T I C S
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CAMPUS LIFE
Harry Potter, Shoved Aside
Maryland Quidditch Takes Game From Flying Fantasy to Serious Sport n a field where the bludgers are flying and the snitch is nowhere in sight, a trio of teammates makes a break for the three rings perched at the opposite end. Weaving around other players, they toss the quaffle back and forth before one of them spikes it past the keeper and through a hoop, scoring 10 points for his squad. Fans of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series can easily identify such a scene as Quidditch, the fictional sport played by broomstick-riding witches and wizards. But the bludgers are really dodgeballs, the quaffle is a volleyball, the flying brooms are PVC pipes and for these players, Gryffindor’s famous seeker is but a footnote in a game that’s no fantasy. Maryland Quidditch, now in its 11th season, is one of more than 150 teams across the U.S. that play the game inspired by Rowling’s books. As it’s played at UMD, however, it’s a gritty, physical sport rather than a magical fan club. “Really good teams usually aren’t the Harry Potter-focused ones,” said Vanessa Barker ’20, president of Maryland Quidditch. “We are very sports-focused. When I was a freshman, we were going down to nationals outside Orlando, Fla., and that’s a really long drive, so what we ended up doing is watching all the Harry Potter movies. Half the team hadn’t seen them before.” Founded in 2005 at Middlebury College, the non-wizarding form of Quidditch—sort of a mixture of basketball, rugby and handball—
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Members of Maryland Quidditch, straddling PVC pipe “brooms,” don’t hold back at practice as they run, push and fling the quaffle and bludgers.
is now played in more than 40 countries. Co-ed teams of seven take the field straddling 40-inch PVC pipes. (During aggressive play, wooden brooms were causing too many injuries and breaking too often.) Players called chasers try to get the volleyball/quaffle through the goal hoops while beaters hurl dodgeballs/bludgers at them.
P H OTOS BY ST E P H A N I E S. CO R D L E
After 18 minutes, the snitch is released— not the tiny flying golden ball in the books and movies, but a neutral player wearing yellow with a Velcro tail attached to their shorts. Seekers try to nab the tail to score 30 points and end the game. With the club sport mentality, Maryland Quidditch practices three times a week. Players ranging from tall and lanky to buff and bearded warm up, execute drills and scrimmage. Despite the occasional passerby stopping to gawk or even take a quick video, players don’t hold back as they push, shove, take opponents out by the legs or slam them to the ground. “People don’t understand the sport when they’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s from Harry Potter,’” Barker said. “But I’m playing a full-contact sport. It’s super intense.” Maryland’s hard work has been paying off. It’s notched six mid-Atlantic regional championships and back-to-back Elite Eight appearances in the U.S. Quidditch Cup. One player, chaser and captain John Sheridan ’20 (who, by the way, hasn’t even cracked open “The Sorcerer’s Stone”), was selected to the U.S. national team’s inaugural Developmental Academy last summer and hopes to play in
A Quick Guide to Quidditch Can’t keep up with the action? Or haven’t read the Harry Potter series? Here’s a brief, magical list of the major terms:
I L L U S T R AT I O N S BY J A S O N A . K E I S L I N G
“People don’t understand the sport when they’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, it’s from Harry Potter.’ But I’m playing a fullcontact sport. It’s super intense.” —VANESSA BARKER ’20
the 2020 Quidditch World Cup. For Maryland’s team, the ultimate goal is always the national title, but members realize this is a rebuilding year after a few key players graduated. They recruited at events like last fall’s First Look Fair. “I was yelling out, ‘Full-contact, co-ed sport!’” Sheridan said of the annual showcase for student clubs and organizations. “Saying that it was Quidditch is not a good recruitment strategy.” UMD, which lost to New York University in the Elite Eight last year, will head to Charleston, W. Va., in April for the 13th U.S. Quidditch Cup. “It’s fun to watch—it’s kind of crazy. It looks like there’s just balls flying,” Barker said. “This really is just about the sport and the team and the camaraderie.”—ad
QUAFFLE: A volleyball that chasers throw through one of three hoops to score 10-point goals. Keepers guard the hoops.
BLUDGERS: Two dodge-
SNITCH: A neutral
BROOMS: Rigid plastic
balls that beaters chuck at opposing players. If hit, players must go back to their side of the field before returning to the game.
yellow-clad player with a Velcro tail attached to their shorts. Seekers try to grab the tail after 18 minutes to score 30 points and end the game.
poles between 39 and 41 inches long, with no splinters or sharp points, that players hold between their legs. PVC pipes are common. Flying powers are not.
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CAMPUS LIFE
Fostering Community
New Program Boosts Students Who Lack Traditional Support or many students starting college, advice on which courses to take, extra cash for a new backpack or just a comforting conversation are only a text message away. But for students who come from the foster care system or who have been homeless, help can be much more elusive. Fostering Terp Success, a new program from the Division of Student Affairs, aims to bolster—or even create—a support system for these students. Participating Terps receive micro-grants to buy textbooks, food and toiletries, bedding and linens, and a plethora of school supplies. They’re also paired with mentors and attend workshops on personal and professional growth. “We wanted to make sure when we created this program that we drew the circle as wide as possible and recognized those overlapping challenges with food and housing insecurity and also that lack of a network of support, and how all of those things together impact students,” says Brian Watkins, director of Parent and Family Affairs and chair of Fostering Terp Success. Over the summer, campus coaches— mentors who commit to nurturing a relationship with a student throughout their time at the university—underwent training to begin to understand how the trauma of the foster care system or homelessness can affect a student’s ability to concentrate on schoolwork. Mentors meet at least monthly with their student and act as a cheerleader. “It could be as simple as a text to say, ‘Hey, thinking about you, hope you have a great day’—providing some of the interaction that would happen from a family member,” says Watkins. Ten students are taking part in the
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program; Watkins estimates that 75 current Terps come from foster care, but said the actual number might be higher. The number of students who come from a background of unstable housing is harder to assess, he says. Students who were known to have been in foster care received a letter from Enrollment Management over the summer alerting them to the new program. Other students known to have had housing instability were also informed about the program. Monnyae Lucas ’22 was raised by her grandmother in Baltimore and connected
with Watkins through her high school adviser. She says the highlight of the program is the sense of community and support that would be otherwise missing. “I don’t necessarily have an escape, just someone I can talk to about what’s going on, and maybe they could relate to what’s going on.” She hopes other students from similar backgrounds will join the program. “My biggest thing I would say is you’re not alone—there’s always a resource for you,” she says.— sl
I L L U S T R AT I O N BY R Y U M I S U N G
Diamondback to End Century-plus Print Run, Take All-Digital Approach AFTER 110 YEARS of hitting newsstands, the last print
copies of The Diamondback roll off the presses in March. That’s when, driven by economic forces battering newspapers nationwide, UMD’s independent student news source goes online-only. Print circulation has declined for years, falling from over 20,000 daily copies in the 1990s, The Diamondback recently noted, to just 8,000 weekly copies. Meanwhile, the paper reaches eight times as many readers online, and costs were expected to exceed advertising revenue in the near future. “We wanted to stay ahead of that,” Tom Madigan ‘07, board president of Maryland Media Inc., the newspaper’s parent company, said in announcing the change. “Rather than operate at a loss, we should take our resources and put them behind something that was going to have greater longevity and offers a lot more room for improvement and innovation.” In place of paper and ink, the publication promises to cater to students’ current news needs with podcasts, a mobile app and more investigations.–LF
An Activist’s Art Exhibit Highlights Work of Romare Bearden A MOTHER AND CHILD reading by
Bearden: Artist as Activist and Visionary,”
lamplight, depicted in striking shades of
focuses on Bearden as both an artist and
blue, brown and yellow. A woman cradling
a social activist.
an older woman at a table overflowing
“Romare Bearden was not only a
with flowers, pears and watermelon. Ships
mature and richly gifted artist—he was
crossing a deep blue ocean, carrying
one of America’s early scholars in the
slaves from one continent to another.
study and documentation of the creative
Romare Bearden, one of the 20th cen-
legacy of African American art,” says
tury’s most celebrated African American
Professor Curlee R. Holton, director of the
artists, was known for his bold collages
Driskell Center. “His unique collage-like
depicting both the everyday joys and the
style and intimate subject matter brought
sociopolitical trials of black life in America.
to life histories and familial relationships
A traveling exhibit on view now at UMD’s David C. Driskell Center, “Romare
of African Americans with respect and affection.”—SL
T H E D I A M O N D BAC K P H OTOS CO U RT ESY O F U N I V E R S I T Y A RC H I V ES ; C O L L A G E B Y R O M A R E B E A R D E N / L I C E N S E D B Y VA G A
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A Home for the Public Good
UMD Begins Construction on New School of Public Policy Building he university of maryland has begun construction on a new School of Public Policy building that will take Terps into the next frontier of government, nonprofit and philanthropic education. The planned 70,000-square-foot academic building, scheduled to open in 2022, will for the first time bring together the school’s 90 faculty members, more than 1,000 undergraduate and graduate students, and five centers and institutes, now spread among five different buildings on campus. “Buildings shape us,” UMD President Wallace D. Loh said at the groundbreaking ceremony in October. “And what is going to be shaped in that building is the next generation of civil servants.” Located next to Chapel Field, just steps from a planned Purple
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Line light-rail station, the School of Public Policy building will be a collaborative venue. Highlights include an assembly chamber modeled in the spirit of rooms at the United Nations; an atrium featuring news screens, stacked seminar rooms and a cascading staircase; and a library and rooftop terrace with scenic views. As the hub of UMD’s Do Good Campus initiative, the building will also feature the new Do Good Hall of Fame and Do Good Plaza. “University of Maryland professors will empower the next generation of policy leaders,” said Adrienne Jones, speaker of the Maryland House of Delegates. “You are creating the future of our state, the future See a video about the new of our economy, and the future is building at terp.umd.edu. boundless.”—lf
R E N D E R I N G B Y L E O A . D A LY/ V J A A
LIVE FROM ! K R A P E G E L COL mpus Comedy Threads Student Show Unites Divergent Ca
into Irreverent Whole
A CAMPUS ORIENTATION LEADER picks up his
approached him last year with the idea of uniting
For Season 2, the directors were presented
ukulele and strums a jolly tune to a group of new
the different comedy groups on campus—sketch,
with about 60 pitches and 30 scripts. After four
freshmen:
improv and standup—for a single show.
rounds of cuts, just 12 sketches made it to the
“We knew we wanted to create something big Welcome to UMD… Cause we got [redacted]
and new and cool,” Green says. MNL debuted in May at the Stamp Colony
show. The challenge was illustrated during the opening monologue in Season 2’s debut,
And you can [redacted]
Ballroom, teamed up with The Clarice to perform
when cast members rushed the stage to pitch
And at the Union Shop if you wait in line,
at NextNOW Fest in September, and took the stage
outrageously bad last-minute ideas to lead writer
You can get a [redacted] for [redacted].
a third time in November at the Stamp’s Hoff
John Hendrick ‘19, like “Genocide, the Musical”
Theater. Another show is scheduled this spring.
or a sketch with “two sisters. They’re witches. We
You’ll understand if Terp can’t fully reproduce
Like SNL, it’s a massive production, involving
give them Tourette’s. We call it ‘Twitches.’” Green says his goal of a dynamic comedy
the spirited ribbing the university takes—and
65 students: 17 cast members, three head
students in the audience eat up—throughout
writers, a host of stage and film hands and even
show with high production values has required
“Maryland Night Live,” a showcase for UMD’s
a 19-piece band. The structure will be familiar
no-nonsense directors who don’t favor their
campus comedians and a spiritual descendant of
to any SNL fan: a cold open, a “Maryland Night
friends, not to mention cast members who are
the venerable NBC ensemble show.
Live” take on Weekend Update known as (sorry,
serious about evoking laughs and plan to pursue
UMPD) “UMD Alerts” and a pair of musical guests.
comedy careers after graduation.
MNL is the brainchild of comedians Sammy
Garcia ’20 and Walker Green ’20. Green, who
Unlike their New York City counterparts who
“These people are so talented, and they have
had transferred to Maryland after a two-year
have the time, money and staffing to churn
the biggest passion,” Garcia says. “It’s not going
hiatus trying to break into comedy in New
out an episode in a week, MNL students write,
away.”—DN
York and Chicago, met Garcia in a class and
rehearse and produce the show over six weeks.
P H O T O BY TA N E E N M O M E N I , C O U R T E SY O F ” M A R Y L A N D N I G H T L I V E ”
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Tall Tale
6-foot-8 Forward Goes From Club Competitor to Terp Teammate ill clark went to 2017’s Maryland Madness, one of the UMD basketball teams’ preseason fan events, and joked with friends about sneaking into the men’s layup line. He passed on the prank then, but one year later, he was doing the drill alongside Bruno Fernando and Jalen Smith as his pals cheered from the stands. During Clark’s junior year, Head Coach Mark Turgeon’s Terps were looking to add some height, the 6-foot-8-inch club player measured up, and now the walk-on is living the dream of just about any club athlete. “It was a little bit intimidating,” Clark says of joining the team, “but it was pretty awesome just to see it all up close and be a part of it.” A Baltimore native, Clark grew up a UMD fan and remembers his dad listening to games on the radio as former Head Coach Gary Williams ’68 led the Terps. He played varsity ball at Loyola Blakefield in Towson, Md., where the competition included future Maryland teammates Smith and Darryl Morsell. He wanted to attend a big university, but accepted that he wouldn’t make a Division I roster. Once Clark arrived at Maryland, he didn’t leave basketball behind. He played pickup at the Eppley Recreation Center and joined the club team his sophomore year. A couple of practices into his junior season, Drew Tawiah, the club president,
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plucked Clark out of the lineup. He was the only athlete there to meet a call from Turgeon’s team for a player at least 6 feet, 7 inches tall. Before the tryout, though, he had to adjust his class schedule to make time for practice and prove he’d mesh in the locker room. “I really wanted to get to know who he was before I watched him dribble, pass or shoot,” says Mark Bialkoski, men’s basketball’s director of operations. “His ability to take in information quickly was really important to us. Coaches aren’t gonna pause practice in order for you to catch up.” Clark passed the tests on and off the court, and before he knew it, he was guarding Smith, getting tips from Fernando and teaming up with Eric Ayala. “I think one of my roommates was actually more excited than me,” Clark says. “Like, he called his parents about it.” Playing in practice with the scout team and warming the bench aren’t glamorous. The forward totaled just four minutes over three appearances in his first season. But Clark is relishing an opportunity very few get—and it doesn’t go unnoticed. “He’s been quietly a really, really good addition to our program,” Bialkoski says. “He knows where to be, when to be, how to be there. Those things helped our team tremendously.”—ad
SPORTS BRIEFS
Lacrosse Teams Net ‘Best of the Decade’ Honors THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND
all-time with 301. Last year, Reese was
men’s and women’s lacrosse teams
inducted into the National Lacrosse
scooped up recognition in Inside
Hall of Fame.
Lacrosse magazine’s “Best of the Decade” edition. Men’s Head Coach John Tillman
Cummings, the only lacrosse player to earn the Tewaaraton Award three times, was a First Team All-American all
and Women’s Head Coach Cathy Reese
four years and a two-time NCAA Most
each took home Coach of the Decade
Outstanding Player. She now plays for
honors. Also from the women’s team,
the Women’s Professional Lacrosse
decade awards went to midfielder
League (WPLL) Fight and is the head
Taylor Cummings ’16 and defender
coach at the McDonogh School.
Megan Douty ’15 as well as the entire program. With Tillman at the helm since 2011,
Douty was a two-time Defender of the Year. She now suits up for the WPLL Command. She and Cummings
went to seven Final Fours and five
won a world championship with Team
national title games and won the
USA in 2017.
Reese guided the Terps to a 215–14
A FORMER TERP RUNNER and current associate head coach will join Team USA for this summer’s Olympic Games in Tokyo. Danielle Siebert ’06, entering her 12th year as a Maryland coach, was named an event manager for Team USA’s track and field, marathon and race walk Olympic squads at the Games, July 24–Aug. 9. Siebert, an accomplished alum of UMD’s crosscountry and track and field teams, has guided recordbreaking performances as a coach. A member of USA Track and Field, she has served on several international team staffs, most recently at the 2019 North American, Central American and Caribbean U23 championships.
of the Year and conference Defender
UMD accumulated a 122–38 record,
championship in 2017.
Track and Field Coach Named to Team USA Staff for 2020 Olympics
From 2010–19, the women’s team won five national championships and
record in the decade, was the quickest
had eight Tewaaraton winners, 20
women’s lacrosse coach ever to
National Players of the Year and 52 All-
300 wins and now stands seventh
Americans—all the most in the sport.
Former Terp Finishes Third in AL Rookie of the Year Voting A MARYLAND BASEBALL ALUM placed third in MLB’s 2019 American League Rookie of the Year voting. Brandon Lowe, a UMD infielder from 2014–15, logged 17 home runs and 51 RBIs in 82 games for the Tampa Bay Rays last season, finishing behind the Houston Astros’ Yordan Alvarez and the Baltimore Orioles’ John Means in award voting. As a Terp, Lowe was a .338 hitter with 10 homers and 30 doubles, helping UMD to consecutive Super Regionals. The Rays selected him in the 2015 MLB Draft, and last season, he became the first Maryland position player named to the All-Star Game since 1947.
Women’s Soccer Makes First Appearance in Big Ten Tournament WITH A 1–0 VICTORY over Michigan State on Oct. 24, the UMD women’s soccer team qualified for the Big Ten tournament for the first time. It was the Terps’ first conference tourney appearance since 2013, their last year as members of the ACC. “They can put their name in the books forever,” said Head Coach Ray Leone. “That matters.” UMD fell to Michigan, 3–0, in the quarterfinals, but ended its historic season with its best conference finish (sixth place at 5–5–1) and first winning record (9–8–3) since 2012.
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FA C U LT Y Q & A D E B O R A H TAY L O R ’ 7 3 M . L . S . ’ 74
The Page Turner
National Book Award Judge Reflects on a Golden Age for Young Adult Literature DEBORAH TAYLOR ’73, M.L.S. ’74 remembers
racing with her classmates from Western High in Baltimore to the local library so they could pass around a copy of “Rosemary’s Baby.” Amidst the tumult of the 1960s, it was one of many books that gave Taylor a way to understand herself and society. An adjunct lecturer in UMD’s College of Information Studies, Taylor spent decades linking adolescents to literature as a librarian and administrator for the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, and judge for the Coretta Scott King Book Awards, Newbery Medal and, most recently, the 2019 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, think white kids see their contemporaries of
What can readers of all ages learn from young adult books?
lists, what readers of all ages can take from
different backgrounds if they’re fed a steady
We always want to revisit that part of our lives
books written for teens, and how to find your
diet of books that demean or marginalize?
where we were in that learning mode, that
young reader’s next page-turner.—LF
Literary merit is not handed down like a stone
discovery mode. It does show that triumph, that
tablet. We decide.
hopefulness. You have this chasm between the
She spoke to Terp about diversifying reading
Are you encouraged by the diversity of young adult books available today?
What do you look for in a book when you are a judge?
that people say are literary. When someone is
There’s certainly some improvement over the
I always look for someone who either tells a
able to do both, you just stand up and applaud.
years when I had so few books to work with.
really simple story very well, or someone who is
And I think there’s a deeper understanding of
telling me a story I’ve never heard before. And
the books that we had accepted as pretty safe.
I also look for people who are able to capture
What advice do you have for parents looking to get their kids into reading?
Like with the controversy around “Little House”
a voice and make me feel that story is being
Do they love dogs? Do they love animals? Are
books, very few people talked about how native
told just to me. That could translate for a young
they intrigued by flowers? See what gives them
kids, kids of color would feel with seeing some
person because, of course, at that age there
joy and what makes them curious or makes them
of those passages. How do you think the kids of
needs to be an intimacy, they need to feel that
stare at something for a long period of time. You
today feel about those books, and how do you
they are being brought in and welcomed.
match the text to that.
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books that people really enjoy and the books
P H O T O B Y J O H N T. C O N S O L I
READER’S CHOICES Deborah Taylor, a sought-after judge in the young adult book world, always has recommendations at the ready. Feel free to browse a few the next time you head to a library or bookstore:
“A Single Shard” BY LINDA SUE PARK
The first Korean American author to win the Newbery, Park writes about a kid in medieval Korea who wants to buck societal expectations and be a potter. “It speaks to everyday life,” she says.
“Bud, Not Buddy” BY CHRISTOPHER PAUL CURTIS
A young African American boy sets out to find his father during the Great Depression. “It’s a hero’s journey,” Taylor says.
“The Hate U Give”
Street-level Cool
Professors Reduce Carbon Emissions in Pavement Recycling Process BLACKTOP IS GETTING GREENER.
UMD civil and environmental engineering faculty have been research-
ing a technique for recycling pavement rather than laying new asphalt. Known as “cold mix,” the technique can reduce emissions 40% to 80%— and even speed up the repaving process. “You don’t need to heat all the aggregates to 300 degrees; you can mix them at room temperature,” says Associate Professor Qingbin Cui, project lead. “You can touch it even when you’re paving the roadway.” The process uses less energy, and therefore emits less CO2. Cold recycling takes milled-up pavement and sprays it with a foamed asphalt to bind and expand the material. It can even be done on site, with no need for carbon-emitting truck transport. “We want to really accelerate the construction process,” Cui says. “With the recycled materials, you can do that overnight easily.” Depending on the project, it’s up to 50% cheaper than new asphalt, says Chuck Schwartz, professor and chair of the department. Drivers won’t notice the difference, they say; recycled pavement is currently only in the lower layers of roads, and the top layer is still traditional pavement. The technique is already hitting roadways. To test it, the Maryland
BY ANGIE THOMAS
State Highway Administration added a lane on Interstate 295 South. The
Caught between her poor neighborhood and her prep school, an African American teenager finds her world is thrown into disarray after she witnesses a friend die in a police shooting. “It is a great example of a book that was written very specifically about one community and spoke to all young people,” she says.
pavement has also been rolled out on parking lots and residential streets. “It’s only a matter of time before somebody says to the secretary of transportation, ‘We have to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions as part of a concerted effort to deal with climate change,’” Schwartz says. “And this is going to be one of the tools that transportation agencies will be able to use to do that.”—MP
“The Adventures of Captain Underpants” BY DAV PILKEY
Taylor says, “I’m a big fan of kids reading things that give them laughter and joy.”
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Cloudy With a Chance of Microbes Undergraduate Student to Test Bacteria From Microorganisms at High Altitude IT’S A BIRD! IT’S A PLANE! Wait, no–it’s actually a University of
Maryland student’s descending payload containing samples of microorganisms plucked from the upper atmosphere. Researchers on a new frontier in atmospheric science are examining surprising evidence that microbes survive at high altitudes and may potentially influence weather by spurring formation of ice crystals and clouds. Since 2016, Caitlyn Singam ’19, M.S. ’20 has been perfecting a device that travels via weather balloon up to 100,000 feet in the air to bring live samples of high-flying bacteria back for study. “Until recently, a lot of folks thought of the atmosphere as being a very passive player in biology,” Singam says. “A key point is that new research suggests that the atmosphere is an active player in biology, which is redefining the way we think about it.” She ran practice launches to ensure the device worked correctly— opening its doors at the correct altitude to let in air to capture samples— before collecting data. The launches were funded by the Maryland Space Grant Consortium, and Robert E. Fischell Distinguished Professor William Bentley in the Fischell Department of Bioengineering offers lab space and guidance to the biological sciences major. “It gets very creative,” Bentley says. “The whole device design, it’s meant to be foolproof. It’s advanced in the sense that if it works and it’s simple, that’s advanced.” Next, she’ll start analyzing her samples for any bacteria, which—if they are alive and able to grow—could indicate if and how they’re contributing to phenomena like cloud formation, she says. “It’s really thrilling to see something like this where I did pretty much all the work by myself go off into the wild blue yonder,” Singam says.—MP
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Scales of Success
Undergrad Specializes in Reptilian Discovery hey sank their fangs into Justin Lee when he was only 2. It was on a trip to the Central Park Zoo, when he spied the snakes slithering behind the glass and was entranced. By 4, the Discovery Network’s reptile shows had become must-see TV. And at 7, he couldn’t just pronounce “herpetologist”—he was declaring his career plans to study reptiles and amphibians. Lee is too modest to claim that title just yet, but he’s earned it. By the time he graduates in May, he’ll have published at least 13 scientific journal articles, including eight as the first author—a striking tally for someone yet to earn a degree. One of his latest research papers describes three species of gecko from Myanmar. Two are new to science, and all of them belong to a genus that had never been recorded on mainland Myanmar. “It’s common for scientists to discover new species or find species that have been known in other areas but never seen in Myanmar before,” he says. “But finding a whole genus, which is a higher taxonomic rank, is a lot more significant.” Lee publishes frequently as an intern at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, where he started working in the summer
T
“I can’t remember a time I didn’t want to know everything about snakes.” —JUSTIN LEE ‘20
after his sophomore year of high school— and a big part of his decision to attend the University of Maryland lay in its proximity to Washington, D.C., and the Smithsonian, as well as a chance to participate in the College Park Scholars living-learning program. The species he described were brought back by Smithsonian herpetologist Daniel Mulcahy, who’s learned to trust Lee’s identification skills. “When we’re collecting, we just put our quick identification on specimens knowing that we’re going to compare them with
P H O T O B Y J O H N T. C O N S O L I
species descriptions in the literature and molecular studies in the lab back home,” Mulcahy says. “Often, Justin has changed an identification based on his evaluation, and it turns out, when I sequence it in the molecular lab, he’s right.” In addition to his lab work, Lee is an avid practitioner of “field herping”—searching for reptiles and amphibians in the wild—and has conducted surveys for the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission. Lee’s childish enthusiasm has ebbed somewhat—he tells the story of the fateful
Christmas when his mom finally let him have a pet snake, only to have it escape as extended family were arriving for the holiday—but his scholarly interest in the behavior, morphology, biogenetics and evolutions of snakes and their cousins has never been stronger. “If my brain were wired differently, maybe it would be insects or birds,” he says. “But I can’t remember a time I didn’t want to know everything about snakes.”—cc Watch a video on Justin Lee at terp.umd.edu.
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As the World Turns Audacious Experiment to Understand Earth’s Magnetic Shield to Get an Overhaul n a hangar-sized laboratory off Paint Branch Drive, Dan Lathrop gives the signal, and what he often calls simply “the experiment” awakens. A huge, steel sphere with tubes and electrical wires snaking across its surface begins a stately, nearly silent rotation inside a towering cage-like structure. That’s the experiment running at visitor speed, however. When only Lathrop, a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher and professor in physics, and his graduate students are present to gather data, they crank up its 350 horsepower electric motor to spin 80 times faster, until the 3-meter globe encasing 25,000 pounds of liquid sodium blurs out at four revolutions per second. For safety reasons, in the 11 years since he first switched the experiment on, no lab guest has ever watched it run that fast. Lathrop hasn’t either, exactly. “You can’t see it at full speed,” he says. If “the experiment” sounds pretty singu-
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Professor Dan Lathrop examines the 3-meter steel sphere he used to simulate the Earth’s magnetic “geodynamo.”
lar, that’s because there’s nothing else like it on the planet. Lathrop, an expert in turbulent flows, envisioned the giant apparatus and several smaller predecessors as a way to simulate and perhaps even predict changes in the Earth’s magnetic field, which originates in its core and helps protect the surface from harmful solar radiation. While the machine has fascinated the geophysics community and generated useful results about planetary magnetic fields, it has never quite fulfilled Lathrop’s hopes. So this year, supported by a recently renewed National Science Foundation grant, he and his lab members will undertake a painstaking process to drain the flammable sodium, dismantle the device, upgrade it and—if the plan works—create a better magnetic model of the Earth.
our planet has a “geodynamo,” a self-generating, self-sustaining magnetic field created by flows in its molten outer core, a layer of mostly iron and nickel more than 3,000 kilometers beneath our feet. Swirling turbulence in the liquid metal, caused by convection and the planet’s rotation, gives rise to electrical currents and magnetic fields that feed on each other. So far, Lathrop’s experiment needs external current to generate a magnetic field; soon he hopes that will no longer be necessary. Doctoral students Rubén Rojas and Artur Perevalov in physics, along with Heidi Myers in geology and Sarah Burnett in mathematics, have been researching ways to modify a hidden, inner sphere of the device—analogous to Earth’s solid inner core—by adding texture to create swirling, helical flows in
P H O T O B Y J O H N T. C O N S O L I
Tackling Parental ADHD to Help Kids
Hidden inside a spinning outer sphere, molten sodium and an even quickerwhirling inner sphere of the geodynamo experiment represent the Earth’s liquid outer core and solid inner core, which together generate a planetary magnetic field.
INSTRUMENT PORTS
RESEARCH HAS ALREADY SHOWN
EXTERNAL MAGNETS
that up to half of all children diagnosed with ADHD have parents with untreated ADHD as well. University of Maryland psychologists now want to determine whether treating parents with the disorder will improve their parenting and help their children with
INNER SPHERE
a shared diagnosis. Funded by a $7 million National Institutes of Mental Health grant,
OUTER SPHERE
psychology Professor Andrea ChronisTuscano and Assistant Clinical Professor Christine Danko are working with pediatricians at Children’s National Health System pediatric satellite clinics and researchers
the highly conductive liquid sodium, generating electrical currents. It’s never been tried before, so the results are hard to predict. “I try not to be a foolish optimist, but you know, you aren’t going to build an experiment like this without a certain amount of optimism that there are interesting things to see,” Lathrop says. The biggest potential prize would be an ability to predict the “weather” of Earth’s magnetic field, which is constantly in flux. Geologic evidence suggests the poles have reversed hundreds of times—most recently 780,000 years ago—and indeed, the North Pole has been moving from Canada toward Russia with increasing speed in recent years. During such a flip, much of the planet’s surface could have a weaker magnetic shield from solar radiation. (For a preview of what that could be like, look at Mars, which lacks a geodynamo.)
Even now, solar storms do create problems on Earth, damaging satellites and sensitive electronics, says Sara Gibson, a solar physicist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. For instance, if a massive 1859 solar storm that caused aurora as far south as the tropics hit today, it could fry communications and electrical grids worldwide. “Dan’s work is really important, because it’s vital to understand the Earth’s magnetic field, which is coupling with what’s coming from the sun, and creating these magnetic impacts,” Gibson says. Lathrop doesn’t promote his research with disaster scenarios. A pole reversal may not be in the offing at all, and would take more than 1,000 years. But what about scientific curiosity as well as simple prudence concerning a factor that allowed life to arise on earth? “You think you’d want a solid scientific base knowing, well, how does it work, and how did it get there?” he says. “Where’s it at now? And where’s it going?”—cc
D I A G R A M BY K O L I N B E H R E N S ; I L L U S T R AT I O N BY J A S O N A . K E I S L I N G
elsewhere to throw a wrench into this intergenerational cycle. “It can be difficult for a parent to create an organized and consistent environment for their child with ADHD if they themselves struggle with executive functioning difficulties such as time management, planning and organization,” Chronis-Tuscano says. The study, which involves testing parents for ADHD at the same time as their children, could be a model for addressing other cross-generational mental health issues as well, the researchers say, leading to better health outcomes for the whole family.—CC
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Information Pump
Doctoral Candidate’s Research Seeks to Broaden Perceptions of Breastfeeding
ere’s a tip you won’t find in “What to Expect When You’re Expecting”: Head to social media for advice on feeding your baby. But after Fiona Jardine M.L.S. ’14, Ph.D. ’20 had her daughter in 2016, the only place she got adequate information on something as personal as breastfeeding was Facebook. Like many mothers, Jardine experienced problems breastfeeding when Georgie had a tongue tie and couldn’t latch. Hoping to avoid a switch to formula, she decided to solely use a breast pump. But despite taking breastfeeding classes, doing research and meeting with a doula, she found little guidance on exclusively using that method. Now, the doctoral candidate in information studies is helping to fill that gap. Through her 170-question survey taken by more than 2,000 exclusive pumpers, Jardine is analyzing their experiences and reasons for choosing the approach, with hopes of helping them feel less alone. “Their lactation consultants didn’t tell
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them anything about it,” Jardine says. “They’ve often had negative reactions from health care providers. They’ve been told that it’s not breastfeeding, or they’re being told that it’s not sustainable.” The former lawyer isn’t one to let problems persist. After beginning her career in death penalty defense, Jardine met her wife and, when they were ready for a child, testified before the Maryland Senate in a successful fight for equal fertility benefits for same-sex couples. In her latest endeavor, the basis of her dissertation project, Jardine uncovers insights into exclusive pumping for both health care providers and women breastfeeding this way. For example, many mothers are told to simply try harder to feed at the breast, but that’s often not a choice. Jardine found that around 70% of respondents reported situations similar to hers, where their baby couldn’t latch. Other reasons for exclusively pumping included problems with the mother’s anatomy, babies spending weeks or months in a hospital’s neonatal intensive care
unit and the need to track an infant’s exact milk intake for health reasons. Less than 10% said they “just wanted to.” As for the method being unsustainable, Jardine’s research found that exclusive pumpers on average successfully used the approach for more than eight months. Jardine, a finalist in the Universitas 21 Three-Minute Thesis competition for explaining her research compellingly and concisely, is also working on the campus’ Need to Feed project to improve feeding facilities and designing inclusive baby feeding symbols that feature illustrated breast pumps. She hopes to open a milk expression research lab and is writing an evidence-based guide to exclusive pumping. “What’s so important about her research is that she’s been there,” says survey respondent Joyce Arnold. “It harkens to something that’s important in moms.”—ad
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THE BIG QUESTION
What technology would society be better off without? SAHAR KHAMIS
SEAN MUSSENDEN
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNICATION
SENIOR LECTURER, PHILIP MERRILL COLLEGE OF JOURNALISM
As a media analyst, communication scholar, educator and parent, I am skeptical of some of the new technology-enabled applications, such as Snapchat, that could be exploited or misused to communicate offensive, inappropriate or even harmful and damaging content without accountability or responsibility. Some young users of such applications may certainly hold a very different opinion, which is fine. You can simply call it a generational gap!
I can think of few single technologies more destructive than gasolinepowered internal combustion engines used in cars, trucks and planes. Because of their outsize contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions powering the climate crisis—15% of all global emissions in 2010, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, they represent an existential threat to human civilization.
GARY LAFREE
JANA VANDERGOOT
CHAIR, DEPARTMENT OF CRIMINOLOGY AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE; FOUNDING DIRECTOR, NATIONAL CONSORTIUM FOR THE STUDY OF TERRORISM AND RESPONSES TO TERRORISM (START)
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, ARCHITECTURE PROGRAM
—
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3D-printed guns. Following on the heels of recent technological advances, individuals and companies have been releasing a range of plastic guns, from pistols to AR-15 type assault rifles that can be downloaded and reproduced by anybody with a 3D printer. The guns cannot be picked up by airport metal detectors. Regulating their production is extremely difficult, and there is already a worldwide network anonymously sharing blueprints and methods. There is no easy way to stop their spread.
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Society might be better off (just for a day!) without trees. Trees are intricately designed living tools that have potential to be better understood and developed by humans as a technology to address many problems society faces, including atmospheric conditions that spur climate change, availability of safe drinking water, and mental health of city dwellers. The disaster of not having trees on earth for a day would help society see their indispensability.
DAVE LEVIN ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE
—
While I hesitate to say that there are no benefits to any given technology, I am increasingly concerned about “deepfakes”: AI that can convincingly alter video of one person to look like someone else. In a society that already grapples with overwhelmingly obvious facts, I fear we may not be prepared to handle convincing fakes. Worse yet, it may provide cover to those who are caught on video red-handed. Goodbye fake news; hello deepfake news.
Share your answer and see more faculty responses at terp.umd.edu/BigQ7 Suggest a future question at terpfeedback.umd.edu
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Growing BeyondMeat BY C H R I S C A R R O L L
//
I L LU S T R AT I O N S BY JO N S T I C H
With Plant-based Protein, Ethan Brown M.P.M. ’97 Sets Out to Change America’s Eating Habits —and Maybe Save the World
That first bite
into an expertly made hamburger is a sensory explosion, and a journey of sorts: It starts with the soft, subtly sweet bun, which gives way to a tangy mix of sauces followed by cool layers of fresh tomato and lettuce and crispy pickles, before you reach creamy molten cheese; and finally, the destination: the smoky char, the fatty richness, the just-plain meatiness of the beef patty that lights up pleasure centers in your brain.
Self-professed meat lover Ethan Brown M.P.M. ’97 is right there with you on this gustatory odyssey, but there’s a twist. As a vegan and the founder and CEO of Beyond Meat, which has mushroomed from a small University of Maryland-backed startup to the nation’s leading plantbased meat company, Brown is pushing for a detour: a burger that bypasses the cow. As he tells it, animal-free meat isn’t a contradiction, and neither is being a carnivorous vegan. While millennia of history and culture have accustomed us to the fact that meat is something carved from an animal carcass, modern science (and Brown spends millions a year on research and development) is asking a new question about what the word means. What if, instead of defining meat by its origin, we simply decide that if it looks, tastes, smells and cooks like meat, then that’s what it is? “What we’re doing, I don’t think about it as meat substitutes or meat alternatives,” Brown says in an interview with Terp. “We’re actually building a piece of meat directly —ETHAN BROWN M.P.M. ’97 from plants.” As consumers grow increasingly concerned about livestock’s role in global warming and the health effects of eating too much animal protein, the 48-year-old Brown stands center stage in a national conversation about meat’s place in society. Various surveys show that 30% to 50% of Americans want to reduce their meat intake, and people are snapping up Beyond Burgers and Beyond Sausage products at a skyrocketing number of retail locations and restaurants. The company reported its first quarterly profit in the fall, with revenues up 250% from a year earlier, after a wildly successful spring IPO. The 11-year-old company’s competitors are expanding their reach as well, from Impossible Foods,
“We’re actually building a piece of meat directly from plants.”
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another scrappy startup with a Maryland connection (see page 31), to major meat producers like Tyson Foods and Smithfield Foods. With an outlook and approach to business deeply influenced by his father, an environmental philosopher and a founder of the School of Public Policy, Brown sees the El Segundo, Calif.-based Beyond Meat as a mission—one aimed at improving human health, reducing the impact of animal agriculture on the environment and improving farm animal welfare—as much as a growing company. A legumebased Beyond Burger, according to a study the company commissioned in 2018 from the University of Michigan, generates 90% less greenhouse gas and has a tiny fraction of the effect on water and land use a beef burger does. The growth of plant-based meat has generated some pushback as well, ranging from farming groups that have successfully lobbied for state laws limiting what can be marketed as meat to questions about the science behind claimed environmental or health benefits—and then there’s the “hands-off-my-cheeseburger” political commentary. But Brown’s not about to confiscate your cheeseburger, condemn your weakness for prime rib or carry away your chili dog. A prime motivation was to give his own meat-eating children an appetizing alternative to eating
animals. (Now 14 and 15, both went vegetarian several years ago.) And that’s basically his idea with Beyond Meat: Stop the eating of animals by selling diners on not just the environment and animal justice arguments, but the taste as well. “We love meat as humans, and I think we want to keep eating it,” Brown says. “So let’s figure out a way to do it that’s good for us and good for the planet.”
Peter Brown, Ethan’s father, has never been a
fan of city living. The former UMD professor focuses his academic work on humanity’s relationship with nature, and found its real-world counterpart in his second vocation: farming. From Ethan Brown’s earliest days, living first in D.C. and then in the University Park neighborhood next to College Park, he accompanied his father on agricultural sojourns around Maryland, including to a 500-acre farm the Browns still own in the rugged landscape west of Cumberland, Md., where they set up a dairy operation. “I fell in love with the whole scene,” he says. “In my office today, I have pictures of the farm.” Brown spent much of his childhood at the farm exploring the pristine woods of the remote property and learning about animals, sometimes by trapping, observing and releasing them. He was also having his first stirrings of conscience about how they’re used. Peter Brown, now a professor and head of the Leadership for the Ecozoic partnership at McGill University in Montreal, estimates Ethan was 7 when he landed on the problem of how society treats pigs, bacon
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providers to most of us, but interesting and intelligent creatures in their own right to the young Ethan. “We had a pet dog, and we would often talk about why the dog was kept and cared for until his old age, and why a pig, which is similar in many ways to a dog, is slaughtered at an economically ideal time,” he says. “He could never As a boy, Ethan Brown (above) come to grips with why the pig’s life was considered of no spent time at his importance.” family’s dairy farm. His concern The elder Brown didn’t provide any easy answers, for animal welfare encouraging Ethan to delve into the question himself, sprouted during his time at the inspired by sources ranging from Thoreau (Ethan’s middle property in the name is Walden) to the family’s Quaker perspectives. rugged hills of the Maryland “He never told me, ‘Here’s how you should think,’” panhandle. Ethan recalls. “He did teach me to ask questions and to try to interpret the world.” Over the years, his idyllic childhood image of farming began to contrast with what he was increasingly learning about the reality of high-volume meat production in America, leading him toward a conclusion: “If I viewed myself as somebody who was fair, then what lens was I using that allowed me to cuddle one of these animals and cut the other one?” Brown is motivated by a deep respect for all forms of life, says Seth Goldman, the founder and former CEO of Honest Tea, who became a Beyond Meat investor in 2012 and now is the company’s executive chair. “He knows you’re not going to —PROFESSOR PETER BROWN build a brand on a guilt trip,” he said before a recent on-campus talk in the Robert G. Hisaoka Speaker Series. “So he focuses on all the positive aspects of the brand: health and vitality, the fact the product has more protein than beef and no cholesterol, protection of the environment. And as a side benefit, we’re taking billions of animals out of the process.”
“He could never come to grips with why the pig’s life was considered of no importance.”
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Brown first turned to vegetarianism as a
teenager, then dropped it while attending Connecticut College, where he graduated in 1994 with a double major in history and government. Ready for adventure, he traveled internationally, including taking a job with a contractor to the State Department in war-torn former Yugoslavia. Still searching for direction, he enrolled in the UMD School of Public Policy’s Master of Public Management (M.P.M.) program in 1995. He remembers sitting in his father’s office in Van Munching Hall one day, grousing about wanting to have more time for fun and lacking a clear career plan, —SETH GOLDMAN, only to have the philosopher deftly EXECUTIVE CHAIR, BEYOND MEAT redirect him. “My dad said to me, ‘What do you view as the greatest problem in the world?’ And I thought about it a lot, and came back later and said climate. If we don’t solve for climate, all the other stuff doesn’t matter, there’s going to be so much chaos. And he said, ‘Well, then you should probably think about your career through that perspective. How can you help solve that problem?’” Brown entered the clean energy field after graduation, including work on electricity restructuring to support renewables and later hydrogen fuel cells. After more than
“He knows you’re not going to build a brand on a guilt trip.”
a decade in the alternative energy sector, however, Brown began to wonder whether he was focusing on the most important source of greenhouse gas emissions. Now fully vegan, he realized that the massive contribution of greenhouse gas from another fuel-related sector (if you think of food as fuel, anyway) was hardly being addressed: animal agriculture, which some sources claim is the world’s largest contributor of greenhouse gas, and which all agree is at least one of the drivers of climate change. “It dawned on me, we’re attending all these conferences and spending enormous amounts of money chasing slight gains in efficiency in fuel cells, and then they’d go have a big steak dinner—total disconnect,” Brown says. “And I realized you don’t want to spend your whole life working, trying to solve a problem, only to find out you and your colleagues are ignoring a major contributing factor.”
While still in the energy industry, Brown began
studying the fundamentals of the substance he had decided to replicate, realizing that from one perspective, meat was pretty simple. “It’s just five things: amino acids, lipids, trace minerals, vitamins and water,” he says. “The ‘aha’ moment was when I realized none of those things are exclusive to the animal.” Could he find a shortcut that would take animals out of
Dozens of scientists work to perfectly replicate a variety of meats at Beyond Meat’s Los Angeles-area headquarters and lab. Some focus on color, using beets (left) and other colorful plants to improve the products; a patty gets squished (center) in a press in a measure of texture; the goal is to create products that smell, taste—and in the case of Beyond Burgers (right)—fry—just like their meat predecessors.
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P H O T O S C O U R T E SY O F B E YO N D M E AT
the process, transforming the five building blocks directly from plants into a viable meat facsimile? “The answer through science is that you can, but I needed people to help me.” At the University of Missouri, Brown found scientists who had created technology to reset the bonds in plant proteins and simulate the fibrous structure of muscle tissue, licensing the technology. Now that he had a foundation, he needed to make it appetizing, so he turned to the Maryland Industrial Partnerships (MIPS) program, which is funded by the state to connect researchers at UMD and other state institutions with Maryland companies. MIPS Associate Director Ronnie Gist connected with Brown as fellow Terps basketball fanatics. (Brown makes yearly trips to catch games at the Xfinity Center with his high school freshman son, who has his sights set on playing for the Terps.) Gist remembers the young CEO, who’s built like an NBA shooting guard at 6 feet 5 inches tall and given to wearing T-shirts and jeans, as both easygoing and highly focused. Gist and colleagues helped Brown connect with Martin Lo, then a UMD professor of food science and nutrition who now owns a company that works around the world to reduce pesticide use. Together, they worked to turn the product from the Missouri technology into something less rubbery and more palatable. A new recipe allowed them to ditch soy, which poses an allergy issue for some, and instead base the product primarily on protein from a less controversial legume—peas—as well as other non-genetically-modified plants, practices the company still insists on. But palatability remained the guiding light, Lo says. “The texture we started with was —ETHAN BROWN M.P.M. ’97 terrible,” he says. “So we found a natural product to help tenderize the meat, and it became more like real chicken—just like pulled chicken from a place like Boston Market.” As part of the funding process, Gist visited the family farm, not far from where Brown was renting space in Cumberland and making plant-based chicken chunks. He was fascinated by a herd of pigs Brown had collected, not to turn into bacon, but to satisfy his childhood urge to give at
“You’ve got to take into account how most Americans actually eat.”
least a few porkers more parity with pampered pooches. The “Chicken Free Strips” were good enough, and Lo’s connections in the food industry strong enough, that Beyond Meat was able to begin selling them at Whole Foods Market locations in 2012. Along with an investment from the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, it was a step Brown says put the company on the map. Beyond Meat developed its first beef-like product in 2014 as other high-profile investors came on board, including Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, actor Leonardo DiCaprio and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who in a 2015 essay pondered the true costs of meat: “The richer the world gets, the more meat it eats; the more meat it eats, the bigger the threat to the planet. How do we square this circle?”
To fulfill the promise of the company name, Beyond
Meat’s modern food science facility just outside Los Angeles is where the magic needs to happen. The recipes start with a mix of pea, rice and mung bean proteins that undergo a proprietary process of heating, pressurizing and cooling. The resulting material then pours from the extruder, a technology also in use on a much larger scale at Beyond Meat’s production facilities in central Missouri. Brown has compared the machines to “a large steer” in both size and function, consuming plant
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material and creating meat-like protein, which undergoes subsequent steps to add flavors and textures. In a stark white sensory testing room down the hall from the extruder, executive chef Cris Sanchez slides a tray across a table laden with dishes including a bratwurst, a hamburger and an empanada. They feature products already on the market, like packaged Beyond Beef, and others that aren’t yet. The Beyond Sausage Sandwich would debut at Dunkin’ locations nationwide the following day. (The company also recently inked distribution agreements with McDonald’s and Denny’s.) The finely tuned production process that makes these deals with mainstream American restaurant chains possible also provokes critics of plant-based meat. In August, vegan and Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, who helped Beyond Meat gain footing, didn’t name names, but said “some of these (companies) that are extremely popular now that are taking the world by storm, if you look at the ingredients, they are super, highly processed foods.” Harvard University nutrition and environmental health faculty voiced similar concerns in an October opinion piece in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and cited a lack of independent, peer-reviewed research —ETHAN BROWN M.P.M. ’97
Surrounded by family and colleagues, Brown celebrates Beyond Meat’s blockbuster IPO in May 2019. It kicked off months of investment that drove up the company’s stock more than 800% above the initial offering.
“Year after year we just iterate, and it’s a thousand failures to one success.”
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studies to substantiate health or environmental benefits. Professor Chad Stahl, chair of UMD’s Department of Animal and Avian Sciences, called the new products an achievement for food science, but questioned marketing that he said plays on public fears about the fate of the planet or people’s heart health, when science hasn’t caught up with the claims. Is plant-based meat the new margarine, he asked, once widely touted as healthier than regular butter? “My problem is not that people are making these products,” he says. “I don’t like how they are marketing them.”
Brown allows he was “disappointed” by Mackey’s criticism, and points out that Beyond Meat isn’t supplanting kale and walnut salads in vegans’ diets—it’s replacing ubiquitous American junk food with a plant product boasting some superior dietary measures and a production process free of antibiotics or potentially harmful chemicals used in meat production. Arguing against processing, he says, is similar to arguing against cooking. “Process just means a series of steps,” he says. “So if someone thinks that food is not healthy that’s processed, they’re going to have to give up pasta, or give up anything that’s gone through any steps other than pulling it off the tree or taking it from the ground.” If people lined up for broccoli like they do at the In-NOut Burger a few blocks north of Beyond Meat HQ, Brown would never have seen a need to step in. “But you’ve got to take into account how most Americans actually eat,” he says. Unlike some entrepreneurs, Brown doesn’t insist his products are perfect, which to him means perfect facsimiles of animal meats. He wouldn’t, for instance, claim a Beyond Burger trounces the classic Double-Double from In-N-Out in a head-to-head burger battle—yet. Achieving that is the mission of the approximately 70
PHOTO: MICHAEL NAGLE/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES
scientists on his staff of about 400 employees; most are divided among four groups, each of which focuses on getting ever closer in the areas Brown says the product must continually improve: flavor, aroma, appearance and texture. FAAT for short. “We believe that if you can close the gap on all four of those, you can create a product that’s indistinguishable from animal protein,” Brown says. In a lab, lead analytical scientist Parker Lee demonstrates one way the company measures texture using a device similar to a small industrial press. It slowly squishes a freshly cooked patty, measuring its resistance. Elsewhere, on a screen next to an electron microscope, he displays a juxtaposition of the tiny structure of Beyond Sausage with that of pork sausage. They look similar, but the mixture of fat and protein in the plant-based product appears slightly simpler, with larger, less evenly spaced globs of fat. But that’s just the current version. “Year after year we just iterate, and it’s a thousand failures to one success,” Brown says. “But all you need is one success.” He doesn’t plan to stop with one, or two. The crowning jewels of plant-based meat are bacon and steak. Those are much harder to recreate than sausage or ground beef, because they’re “naked,” Brown says— whole pieces of meat with the natural structures of the animals on clear display. Brown’s rescue pigs, which he moved from his Maryland farm to a sanctuary in Tennessee after relocating Beyond Meat to California, are rooting for him to succeed. terp
At Impossible Foods, Alumna Uncovers Meat’s Mysteries THAT OTHER BIG PLANT-BASED meat company
has a healthy Maryland connection as well. Ranjani Varadan Ph.D. ’04 (right) is vice president of research and development at Impossible Foods—basically, the scientist leading the company’s drive to master what makes meat meaty, and reproduce that heady essence in Impossible Burger patties. The product made a cultural splash last year with the rollout of Burger King’s beef-free Impossible Whopper. It might sound like an odd assignment for a lifelong vegetarian who has never felt the call of a juicy burger. “I really don’t,” she laughs. “(Impossible Foods founder) Pat Brown has said the Impossible Burger is not targeted to vegetarians, but to the real hard-core meat eaters.” But when it comes to recreating meat from plants, loving the taste of cooked cow pales in significance to an agile scientific mind. At UMD, Varadan delved into protein science under biochemistry Professor David Fushman, arriving with little background in the experimental techniques he uses. She quickly acclimated and earned her degree in four years—record speed for his lab—doing pioneering research in protein signaling. “Ranjani was my first graduate student, and I probably still rank her as my top one,” Fushman says. “She can produce a lot of data and analyze it very quickly, but it’s not just hard work … she’s inventive and thoughtful.” After several academic postings, Varadan joined Impossible Foods at its founding in 2011, rising to director of protein discovery, then vice president of R&D last year. Although researchers with her training frequently find a place in the pharmaceutical industry, she leaped at the chance to make a positive impact on the global environment. “I think it’s very rare that your professional interests intersect with something mission-based, that you believe in,” she says.—CC
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I L L U S T R AT I O N / P H O T O C R E D I T
, h O ! f f i n S
Guide dogs undergo months of training before they’re ready to assist visually impaired handlers. For the first studentsponsored pup at UMD, class is in session. BY ANNIE DANKELSON
PHOTOS BY STEPHANIE S. CORDLE
L L ’ U O Y S E C A L P THE
WHILE THE STUDENTS around him take notes, a 30-pound black bundle of fur beneath a desk in LeFrak Hall is prepping for his future, too—although, sprawled and snoozing, he appears to be taking a more relaxed approach to his studies. Sporting a bright yellow vest and an insatiable appetite for kibble, he’s a member of the University of Maryland’s chapter of the Guide Dog Foundation, which trains dogs and provides them free of charge to assist visually impaired people. UMD’s group, called Terps Raising Pups, has developed dozens of dogs over the past three years, but this particular pooch holds a special distinction. After ramping up its fundraising last spring, Maryland’s chapter amassed the $6,000 needed for the first Terp-sponsored, Terp-
named puppy. Members took the direct route when naming him, settling on “Terp.” The black Lab arrived on campus at 11 weeks old in August, trotting at the heels of his raiser, Kim Harrity ’20, as she attends class, runs errands and heads to the gym. In short, anywhere she goes, he goes, so he can get accustomed to a variety of environments. “We really just want them to be really calm in a lot of situations—and confident,” says Harrity, one of Terps Raising Pups’ area coordinators. The club partners with UMD’s Accessibility and Disability Service and gives professors a heads-up that an extra four-legged pupil will join them in the lecture hall. Besides getting more than a dog’s fair share of hearing and speech sciences information in Harrity’s senior courses, Terp also attends at least three classes
of his own a month. There, he’s mastering the arts of sitting, staying, and keeping calm around his puppy pals, and the all-important skill of relieving himself on command. “Every dog is different. They all have their different challenges,” says Scott Howarth ’21, fundraising group leader of UMD’s chapter. After 14 to 18 months of learning to be a very good boy on campus, Terp will graduate to the Guide Dog Foundation headquarters in Long Island, N.Y., to complete 14 weeks of formal training before he heads off with his new handler. Some days are harder than others, but he’s working like a dog. How do we know what those first few months were like? Take it straight from the puppy’s mouth.
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AUG. 14 So much is happening at the University of Maryland— People! Squirrels! Skateboards! Food! Sometimes it’s hard to focus on what Kim wants me to do. One thing I’m sure of: My name is Terp. I get yummy kibble every time I respond to that strange word. And everyone here loves me! People yell, “Go Terps!” all the time.
SEPT. 5 I’ve gotten really good at napping through Kim’s classes, but now I’m going to my own puppy class and I have to pay attention. I’m the smallest one here, and the older dogs are all circled around a Kim-like person telling us how to be calm and listen to our humans—hey, what’s that smell? I better check out those backpacks. SEPT. 10 Kim put what she called a “gentle leader” on my snout, which makes it harder to pull on my leash. It itches, but that should be no match for a nice roll in the grass! SEPT. 10 My paws have been busy getting used to all kinds of strange surfaces on campus. I walk over grates, bricks, stairs, even construction zones, which sometimes sound scary. Kim hardly has to carry me anywhere anymore—except sometimes out of class, so I don’t have an accident.
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P U P PY P H OTO CO U RT ESY O F G U I D E D O G F O U N D AT I O N
SEPT. 18 Kim says we can’t let everyone come up and pet us because we have a job to do. Sometimes, at puppy class, our humans even run up to us with the squeakiest, highest-pitched voices I’ve ever heard so we can practice ignoring them. I’m not a pro yet, but I’m getting there.
SEPT. 20 Some mornings, before we go to class, Kim takes me to a strange room with people lifting heavy objects or somehow running really fast without going anywhere. She straps me to a run-nowhere machine, which makes beeping noises before she starts jogging. I don’t mind, though. I just gnaw on my chew toy before I drift off. OCT. 21 Kim has been staring at her glowing clicky toy, called a laptop computer, a lot lately and keeps mentioning something called “midterms,” so while she works today, I’m hanging out with another human, Annemarie Gray ’22. Sometimes Kim takes me to the library with her, but other times she needs a break—I guess I can be a handful!
OCT. 23 Today I practiced staying calm at a little outdoor market with apples, pumpkins, veggies, soap and all sorts of interesting smells. My sister Hudson was there too. Even though we’re from the same litter, I’ve been growing so fast that I’m already bigger than she is! NOV. 5 I love snoozing in the car with Kim, but this morning we rode in a super-big car called a bus with lots of other people. We rode over a few bumps, but I’m learning to adapt to traveling lots of different ways. So I just curled up under Kim’s seat and enjoyed the ride.
NOV. 14 I’m not the littlest guy in puppy class anymore! Now when Kim drops kibble on the ground, I can resist and just leave it there. I’m also good at ignoring toys and other distractions when it’s time to focus. Kim says I’ve come a long way, but there’s still lots of work to do before I meet my handler one day. I’m ready for it—especially if the treats keep coming. TERP
See more of Terp’s puppy pics at terp. umd.edu.
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A LIFE OF
SEN TEN CES
An armed carjacking at age 16 sent Reginald Dwayne Betts ’09 to prison—and started his remarkable path to the worlds of literature and law.
BY SA L A L E V I N ’ 10 P H OTOS BY ST E P H A N I E S. CORDLE
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T
he rubik’s cube in Reginald Dwayne Betts’ hands is so close to complete—the top layer is the only one giving him trouble. On a September morning in a coffee shop in New Haven, Conn., he twirls it round and round, spinning it this way and that, and yet one square on each side remains stubbornly the wrong color. Over the last year, Betts ’09 has been mastering the cube, inspired by a colleague who brought in the toy one day and the discovery that he has a knack for sorting it out. YouTube videos have improved his skills. “All of a sudden it was demystified,” he says. Solving the puzzle is nothing more than a simple algorithm. “It’s just like life. If you figure out the right steps, then you can get to where you need to be.” The metaphor is so neat that I have to wonder if Betts planned it. And if the colors don’t fall into place? “If you have faith in the steps you’ve taken, then it might be something wrong in the way you structure those steps. I know those steps were right, I know that the algorithm was right, but maybe I was in the wrong place.” At 39, Betts—tall and striking, with a full beard and the kind of thick-rimmed glasses you’d imagine a poet wearing—knows right steps from wrong steps. An armed carjacking at age 16 cleaved his life into before and after: before, a childhood of run-of-the-mill classroom troublemaking, and after, a maze of courtrooms and jail cells. And then, another turn: In prison, Betts, long a reader, began to write his story, first with a memoir and then two acclaimed books of poems, followed last fall by another poetry collection, “Felon.” Along the way, college called, repeatedly: an undergraduate degree at the University of Maryland, an MFA at Warren Wilson College, then a J.D. and now a Ph.D. in law at Yale. This morning, Betts stops the conversation more than once to note that he likes
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the song playing in the coffee shop, even when he acknowledges it as “hokey.” Betts is comfortable with the lowbrow and high. That schmaltzy Ed Sheeran song? He likes it. A long digression on fatherhood in August Wilson’s play “King Hedley II”? He can hold forth on that, too. And when it comes to why he pursued law, he’s equally without pretense. “Law is this human invention that allows us not to kill each other,” he says. “I don’t think that just kindness will suffice.”
etts’ childhood in Suitland, Md., just outside Washington, wasn’t much different from those of his classmates. A smart kid, he’d been in gifted and talented programs since second grade. He lived with his mom, smoked weed with his buddies, mouthed off to teachers. “He was very talkative, extroverted, always really excited about whatever it was he was talking about,” says Marcus Bullock, who met Betts playing basketball at Suitland High School. “He was pure passion.” Betts’ father didn’t have much of a role in his life—he’d done time in prison. The two share a name (though the younger Betts goes by Dwayne), but Betts rejects the idea that past is necessarily prologue. “We need a shorthand to talk about pathology, to assert pathology,” he says. “Not having a father in the house is a shorthand— sometimes we don’t have f---ing answers, so saying that becomes an easier answer.”
On Dec. 6, 1996, Betts drove with Bullock and a few other boys, whom he knew only vaguely or not at all, to Springfield Mall in Fairfax, Va. High and hoping for some extra cash, the boys pulled into the parking lot. The driver put a pistol in Betts’ hand—the first time Betts had ever held a gun—and out he went into the night. He approached a green Pontiac Grand Prix, saw a man sleeping inside, tapped the window with the gun and demanded the man’s keys and wallet. Then he and his friend drove off in the car. Two days later, he and Bullock were arrested with the man’s credit card at a different mall. Betts appeared before a judge only to learn he’d remain in custody until his next court date, in January, after Christmas. “I was still thinking about video games, which on one level is mind-boggling, but on another level probably is absolutely age-appropriate. The real tension is that robbery isn’t age-appropriate, and the real tension is the state, the system, the court trying to figure out what you do when somebody’s doing something that is just not okay.” Ultimately, Betts was sentenced to nine years in prison—time that changed the calculation of what’s age-appropriate. “Being teenagers sentenced to maximum-security prison—it’ll force you to grow up fast,” says Bullock, who also served time for his role in the carjacking. “We had to adjust to the environment around us to keep us alive.” Betts spent nearly a year and a half in solitary confinement. Each morning guards took his mattress so that he could not sleep during the day. Around him, men were sometimes strapped down by their arms and legs. Others talked to themselves. “How do I explain this?” Betts has written. “Each day, I lost a little bit of what made me want to be free.” It was in solitary confinement that Betts found poetry, or it found him. One day, a
copy of “The Black Poets,” an anthology edited by Dudley Randall, appeared under his door at Red Onion State Prison, a supermax prison in Southwest Virginia known as the state’s toughest. Soon, Betts was writing poetry, too: “ten thousand / years of sentences / beckon over heads & hearts, / silent, a promise, like mistletoe.”
fter being released from prison in 2005 at age 24, Betts got an entry-level job at a Duron Paints shop in Washington, D.C., alongside Bullock. Soon, Betts was thinking about college. After meeting with an adviser at the University of Maryland, Betts started taking classes at Prince George’s Community College and left his job for another at the Bowie, Md., location of Karibu Books, a black-owned chain of stores. One day, he chatted up a customer named Terese Robinson, also a student at the college. They married three years later. After finishing at Prince George’s Community College, Betts enrolled at UMD. Separated from the other students by his history and age—and his home life with a wife and, soon, their first child, Micah—Betts bore down on academics. In Professor Emeritus Maynard “Sandy” Mack’s introductory class on Shakespeare, it was immediately “clear that this guy was operating on a different level from the rest of the students,” Mack says. “He raised his hand tentatively and asked a question so much richer and more thoughtful than where anybody is on the first day of class.” In 2009, Betts addressed the university as the student speaker at commencement and published “A Question of Freedom: A Memoir
P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F R E G I N A L D D W AY N E B E T T S
essay in The New York Times Magazine. But he also offered a more complex motivation. “Maybe we all pursued law to save someone left behind,” he wrote. “Maybe we pursued it to save ourselves.” Accepted by eight law schools, including Harvard, Columbia and Georgetown, Betts enrolled at Yale, where he made no secret of his past. His application’s personal statement opened with, “The part of my life that has been most influential in my drive to go to law school is also the greatest obstacle to my being admitted to law school and becoming an attorney.” Betts and his children attend his graduation from Yale Law School. He’s now pursuing a doctorate there in law. Michael Wishnie, William O. Douglas Clinical Professor of Law, was one of the two faculty readers for that application. “I almost of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age never remember admissions files—I read 50 in Prison.” “By then I knew all the facts, but a year and a handful of people are admitted, facts on something like this are only a small but I never retain the names,” he says. Betts, part of the story,” says Mack. “It’s the pain however, stood out. “I really felt amazed that and thoughtfulness that really get to you.” I got to be on the same campus as someone Betts’ first book of poetry, 2010’s “Shahid like him.” Reads His Own Palm,” also mined the In law school, Betts was, he says, a “real pain of his time behind bars, evoking what student,” more fully engaged in campus life NPR called “a repeated quiet devastation.” than he was as an undergrad—he organized He also began speaking publicly about his a speaker series, worked in law life’s path. In 2012, he was clinics and gave a book talk appointed by President Barack on his memoir. “I was more Obama to act as a spokessettled. I thought I had made it person for the Coordinating to some final destination, at least Council on Juvenile Justice and academically.” Delinquency Prevention. “This When it came time to apply work is about getting people I to the bar, Betts hit a snag. His know out” of prison, he says. application was deferred as the “I’m thinking about friends.” Connecticut Bar Examining A fellowship at Harvard’s Committee decided it needed Radcliffe Institute for Advanced more time to determine whether Study led to Betts’ next book of —REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS Betts met the “character and poetry, 2015’s “Bastards of the fitness” requirement. Reagan Era,” and a year later, The bar’s decision, Betts says, was “disaphe decided to apply to law school. “I figured pointing,” if not entirely surprising. Wishnie that at least for three years, my student loan and New Haven attorney Willie Dow served bill wouldn’t be due each month,” he wrote pro bono as co-counsel on Betts’ case. They in a 2018 National Magazine Award-winning
“This work is about getting people I know out [of prison]. I’m thinking about friends.”
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Reginald Dwayne Betts signs copies of “Felon” at the nonprofit New America in Washington, D.C., in October. His new poetry collection focuses on the role prison plays in marriage, fatherhood and other relationships for formerly incarcerated people.
collected letters and statements attesting to Betts’ character from professors, other law students, judges, incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people—“just an enormous array of people from all walks of life who had the good fortune of meeting Dwayne somewhere along the way,” says Wishnie. The letters worked—Betts was admitted to the bar several months later. “I think admitting Dwayne Betts raises the average moral character of the members of the bar in Connecticut,” Wishnie says.
elon”: It’s a confrontational book title, and itself a question about how the world labels people. Felon, ex-convict, formerly incarcerated person—“I see myself as all those things, and see those things as failing to actually describe what’s most meaningful about a person,” Betts says. If his first book of poetry was “rooted in prison and in the experience of people who are incarcerated” and his second was about the war on drugs and its ramifications, this third one examines interpersonal relationships: Love poems, absent from his first two collections, are in these pages. The poems—which Betts received a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship to
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write—navigate “the challenges that confront men in relationships with women where the time you spent in prison is the third person in that relationship,” he says. Children, too, make appearances in the poems. “Betts’s poems about fatherhood, some of the most powerful I’ve read, describe a nearly unimaginable bind: how do you explain that you actually did something that a racist would assume you were likely to end up doing anyway?” wrote Dan Chiasson in a review of “Felon” in The New Yorker. Betts says his sons—Miles and Micah, now 7 and 11—don’t ask much about his time in prison, but “they also don’t ask me about my experiences in law school.” School isn’t over for Betts—his Ph.D., which he estimates he’ll finish in about two years, is a way for him to learn what “I feel
like I need to know to be a legal scholar,” he says. The classroom is a natural fit for Betts, says Bullock, who remembers him as “an academic” from high school. “It wouldn’t surprise me if Dwayne was like, ‘I’m going to get another Ph.D.,’” he says. “I’d say, ‘Yeah, that sounds about right.’” Back at the coffee shop, Betts readies to leave to meet a photographer from The New Yorker for a portrait to accompany Chiasson’s book review. He triumphantly tosses the completed Rubik’s cube on the table. “It was just one stupid thing that I was doing,” he says. “I was facing the cube the wrong way on that last move, so I was just going in circles.” And now, here’s proof: He’s turned the cube around. He had faith that he knew the steps. The algorithm, it turns out, was right. terp
Join us on March 4, 2020 for the University of Maryland’s annual Giving Day, where Terps come together to raise millions of dollars in support of student scholarships, academic programs and campus initiatives that help advance our university.
What will you support on March 4? I L L U S T R AT I O N / P H O T O C R E D I T
WINTER 2020
# G I V I N G D AY U M D | G I V I N G D AY. U M D . E D U
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Letter From the Executive Director
Rising Terp Award
The following alumni are an inspiration to the next generation of Terp leaders. All under the age of 30, they have already made significant professional accomplishments.
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND Alumni
Association, we strive to provide programs,
Beth Barkley ’12, M.Ed. ’13 Secondary English/ Language Arts Teacher, District of Columbia Public Schools
events and activities that Terps want and enjoy. So we recently asked for your feedback, and 8,000 of you responded. Our survey encouraged alumni to share their attitudes toward the university and Alumni Association, along with their preferences and interests. When asked what should be our top priorities, the No. 1 answer was “to connect alumni for professional networking and career development,” followed closely by “to connect alumni for social events and fun experiences.”
Mackenzie Burnett ’15 Co-founder, The Next 50
Your Alumni Association is working hard to deliver on those priorities. We recently hired a new manager of alumni career programs, Ellie Geraghty, who will work to expand and strengthen our offerings, both in person and through virtual platforms. We’re also focused on helping Terps grow personally and professionally through: • Terrapins Connect, with 2,800+ volunteer mentors helping fellow
Jonathan Chen ’14 Co-founder and Technology Advisor, FiscalNote Co-founder and CTO, Pathover
alumni navigate their career paths; • Webinars to learn from alumni experts and faculty members; • Networking events to meet other business leaders and C-suite executives (many of which Alumni Association members can attend for free); • The Alumni Association’s LinkedIn page, a tool for networking and finding job openings; • A robust calendar of nationwide networking events that cater to entrepreneurs, attorneys, Terps in real estate and more; and
Research Award
The following alumni have led transformational research with local and global impact.
• The Alumni Directory, where you can find alumni in your region, profession or company. Learn more about these and other opportunities at alumni.umd.edu/prof-dev. As a part of our mission to serve our alumni community of more than
Sharon Fries-Britt ’81, Ph.D. ’94 Higher Education Professor, University of Maryland
377,000, we recently revamped our awards program. Read on these pages about these inspiring Terps and all they have accomplished. Go Terps!
Amy Eichhorst
Executive Director University of Maryland Alumni Association
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Stephen Kerber ’03, M.S. ’05 Vice President, Research, Underwriters Laboratories
The Alumni Excellence Awards Graduates of the University of Maryland are among the best and brightest in their fields. From scholars and innovators to entrepreneurs, teachers and researchers, our alumni are leaving their mark on our state, nation and world. The Alumni Excellence Awards recognize the accomplishments of select Terps and honor these recipients with distinction. The following standout alumni are the inaugural recipients of this honor. Learn more at alumni.umd.edu/excellence.
Legacy Award
This alumnus has left a positive legacy in his community, and the award celebrates his personal and professional lifetime achievements.
SAVE THE DATE
A Celebration of Terps Featuring the Maryland Awards APRIL 24, 2020
EnTERPreneur Award
These Terps are fearlessly disrupting their industries as successful entrepreneurs who have notably contributed to their respective fields.
Anthony Casalena ’05 Founder and CEO, Squarespace
Evan Lutz ’14 CEO, Hungry Harvest
Shayan Zadeh M.S. ’02 Founder and CEO, Leap Rail
David Diehl ’74 Retired, Executive Director (Emeritus), M Club Foundation Retired, Chief of Computer Security and Oversight, Nuclear Regulatory Commission
EACH SPRING , the Alumni Association celebrates
the achievements of seven outstanding Terps at this marquee event, bestowing the highest awards that alumni can receive from the university. This event recognizes fearless alumni who have risen to the highest levels of public service, launched successful companies and made groundbreaking discoveries. The recipients are icons to our students, alumni and the greater community. For additional information and past award recipients, visit alumni.umd.edu/Maryland-Awards.
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D O M I N I Q U E FOX WO RT H ’ 0 4
After getting a Harvard MBA and spending time in the sports labor world, Domonique Foxworth became a commentator on ESPN and The Undefeated. He covered the NFL season with his own Internet show recorded in a D.C. studio.
Man-to-Man Coverage Foxworth Finds New Purpose in Straight Talk on Sports Media
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omonique foxworth ’04 has never taken the typical path of a pro athlete, which is probably why his latest foray into sports media feels so surprising. “I didn’t want to be the cliché,” says Foxworth, a star UMD cornerback who retired from the NFL after six seasons in 2012, then headed to Harvard Business School for his MBA. “It wasn’t what I had planned, but it’s worked out well.” Which is not to say that Foxworth’s current role as a commentator is designed around
D
a stereotypical, aw-shucks-nostalgia image of the football booth; as an ESPN pundit and host of the web show “I Don’t Give a Damn,” he spent the last NFL season looking to make waves with hard truths. His biggest goal, Foxworth says, has been to maintain a player’s perspective seven years since he last donned a helmet. He got some attention for doing just that during the early weeks of the 2019 NFL season, when he described the Miami Dolphins roster fire sale following jaw-dropping losses as “unethical and morally reprehensible.”
P H O T O B Y J O H N T. C O N S O L I
CLASS NOTES
SAHIL RAHMAN ’12 and RAHUL VINOD ’11 , who
A handful of peers thought it was over the top, with one Miami Herald writer saying roster dismantling wasn’t so uncommon and calling Foxworth’s perspective “just silly.” But Foxworth counters that he was simply applying his empathy for players who got a dream job in a bad situation—“I know how hard it is to get there”—along with his business education and the obligations that employers have to provide a safe environment conducive to success. “When it comes down to it, (playing in the NFL) is a job,” he says. “Many of the same things that apply to other careers apply to this one.” Advocating for professional athletes isn’t new to him. While in the NFL, Foxworth was elected president of the NFL Players Association, and following his time at Harvard he became the chief operating officer of the National Basketball Players Association. But he only lasted a year, worn out by the long hours and subway rides.
Foxworth started writing during his self-imposed sabbatical and found a voice at The Undefeated, an ESPN project devoted to discussing the intersection of race, sports and culture. He’s talked to Baltimore Ravens legend Ed Reed about race and policing, explored the use of cognitive tests in the NFL combine, and documented the mental and emotional struggles that come with trying to keep a roster spot. “I understand when I see players crying after suffering an injury, or snapping on coaches, teammates or fans after a game,” he wrote. “They might be carrying a weight heavier than the final score.” And while being an outsider commenting on sports took some getting used to, Foxworth finds satisfaction in trying to find new and under-covered angles within the daily sports grind. “It often feels more impactful than anything I can do,” he says.—lf
opened Indian fastcasual eatery Rasa in Southeast D.C. in December 2017 to rave reviews, plan to add a second restaurant to the city this winter, with a third to follow in the spring in nearby Arlington, Va. JASON REYNOLDS ’05 was a
finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in Young People’s Literature for his novel “Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks.” He’s the author of 12 books for middle schoolers and young adults. (See our profile of him in Terp Spring 2018.) NATASHA ROTHWELL ’03 ,
co-star of the HBO series “Insecure,” wrote with singer John Legend a modernized version of the holiday classic “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” which he recorded with Kelly Clarkson. The new lyrics for the #MeToo era replace those that critics have
HOT TAKES
suggested celebrated an outdated gender dynamic and hinted at
On his new show, Foxworth speaks up on the NFL’s burning questions and biggest news:
ON ABOLISHING THE NFL DRAFT: Instead of having the teams go up and choose the player, why can’t we make it free agency? … Often the problem is that a team is not prepared to build around the player in the right way.
ON THE CONTROVERSY SURROUNDING A WORKOUT FOR COLIN KAEPERNICK: No team really feels confident or feels like they can trust Kaepernick to be on their team, and I can understand that he feels like he can’t trust them.
I L L U S T R AT I O N S BY J A S O N A . K E I S L I N G
ON PROBLEMS WITH NFL INJURY DIAGNOSIS AND TREATMENT: There is just a problematic conflict of interest when your medical professional is being paid by the team. I don’t know what the future is, but it would be great to get to a point where they have a complete third party tending to all the injuries.
ON THE WASHINGTON REDSKINS: It’s hard to root for them as long as they don’t change that name. You gotta change that name at some point.
date rape. DAVID SATTERFIELD ’76 was
sworn in as ambassador to Turkey. A career diplomat, he most recently served as acting assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs since 2017. He also has held top posts in Italy, Libya, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia.
Submit your class notes and read many more at terp.umd.edu.
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Found in Space
How a 19-Year-Old Student Engineering Project Showed Up in a New Sci-Fi Book
space mission planned by a group of University of Maryland aerospace engineering undergraduates at the turn of the century recently took flight—at least in the pages of a sci-fi novel. “Clarke Station,” the capstone design project for a group of 2001 graduates (who named it in honor of Arthur C. Clarke, author of “2001: A Space Odyssey”), inspired the fictional spaceship at the center of New York Times bestselling author Daniel Suarez’s latest book, “Delta-v,” a near-future epic about the first mission to mine an asteroid. Suarez, who specializes in novels that closely hew to actual science and technology, found plans for the artificial gravity station online during advance research. “It had all the information I really
A
For a 2001 capstone project, engineering students designed a three-armed space station that revolves to create artificial gravity.
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needed to get down to the brass tacks of how to design this,” he says. Although he didn’t contact any of the team, Suarez named all 24 students, along with their advisers, aerospace engineering Professors David Akin and Mary Bowden, in the book’s acknowledgements. “I just started reading it, and I’m looking forward to seeing how our wild design shows up in the book,” says Cristin Sawin Rosenbaum ’01, who today works in the semiconductor industry in Portland, Ore., and admits she skipped straight to the back to see her name in print. Three-armed Clarke Station was designed to orbit between the Earth and moon, spinning at 3 rpm to create artificial gravity for astronauts inhabiting modules at the end of two of the arms. Scientists who’ve studied astronauts after extended periods in space believe that journeys of the duration required to travel beyond Mars could harm astronauts through bone and muscle loss and changes to the circulatory and other systems. “The idea behind Clarke Station was to design an artificial gravity space station so we can put humans in different levels of gravity and study what it does to human physiology,” says Akin, who has since helped oversee other space station capstone design projects in 2007 and 2013. “If you started seeing signs of illness, you could bail out and be back on Earth in three days. You couldn’t do that in the middle of a ninemonth trip to Mars.” One of his former students, Dominic DiPasquale ’01, is now an independent space consultant in Atlanta who’s worked on projects including, among other things, real-life space station designs. Clarke Station, he says, helped set him on the path to his career. “Some of the advanced concept stuff I work on now gets kind of close to Clarke Station,” he says. “I’m just realizing now how influential it was.”—cc
R E N D E R I N G B Y K O L I N B E H R E N S ; B A C K G R O U N D I M A G E B Y N I C K O W U O R ( A S T R O . N I C .V I S U A L S ) / U N S P L A S H
ALUMNI
FROM THE ARCHIVES
Bugging Out
19th-Century Models Reveal Insects’ Insides— and Entomology’s Past JUDGING FROM THE PRACTICALLY ANCIENT yet nearly perfect silk-
worm model that Maryland entomology students studied for more than a century, they don’t make papier-mâché like they used to. Around 1891, the University of Maryland—then the Maryland Agricultural College—purchased three of the oversized models of silkworm moths and larva for use in entomology instruction. French anatomist and naturalist Louis Thomas Jérôme Auzoux used the state-of-the-art craft technique to construct anatomically correct creatures inside and out. Pry open the larva model, for instance, and you’ll find its nerve cord, digestive system and other organs. Auzoux died in 1880, so the bugs may not have been new when they landed at UMD. Yet they nested in the Department of Entomology until Professor Emeritus Donald H. Messersmith handed them over to University Archives to preserve in 2012. After at least 140 years, it’s fair to say the teaching tools still have legs—several pairs of them.—AD
Above: Entomology students in 1900 examine giant silkworm models—papiermâché study tools that are still intact and housed at the University Archives today.
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