FEATURES ONLINE
18 Welcome to the Hotel Influenza
A groundbreaking UMD researcher investigating how respiratory infections spread asks volunteers to check in—and get sick for science.
BY CHRIS CARROLL
24 10 in 10
From titles to revenue to academics, Maryland scored by joining the Big Ten Conference. Here are 10 ways it’s been a B1G decade.
BY ANNIE KRAKOWER
30 “Connie” Breaks a Story: Her Own Trailblazing journalist Connie Chung ’69 battled misogyny and racism to reach the pinnacle of TV news. In a new self-titled memoir, she shares what it took to get there.
BY KAREN SHIH ’09
A New Home for Justice
The historic elementary school attended by Thurgood Marshall reopens as a Baltimore gathering place, research hub and legal center—thanks in part to UMD.
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Bar None
Fifty years ago, a Terp invented the Universal Product Code, an innovation that still shapes our shopping.
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High-Tech Help in Clearing Your Plate
Researchers’ robotic system aims to improve autonomy for people with mobility limitations.
this summer, when my senior-year Terp contracted COVID-19 for the third time, he felt more frustrated than sick.
He quarantined in his room (again), missed an overnight trip to Ocean City with friends and didn’t get paid for shifts he couldn’t work at a local restaurant.
My son doesn’t know where he caught the virus, but he’s relatively lucky. COVID killed 75,000 people in the U.S. in 2023, while the flu was fatal to at least another 25,000 and sickened up to 65 million, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Figuring out how respiratory diseases spread is vital to saving lives—along with keeping society happily humming along.
That’s been the mission of Don Milton, a UMD professor of environmental health, since long before COVID struck. The pandemic exposed how little we know about this—remember wiping down our groceries before bringing them inside? It also brought to light how right he’d been all along in pointing to microscopic droplets that linger in the air as the likely culprit.
Years ago, Milton was ignored, even maligned for his theories. Now he’s running a five-year study with $20 million in federal and private funding in a historic Baltimore hotel and a research team tracking if and how volunteers with the flu give it to their healthy counterparts.
Writer Chris Carroll has been following its progress from the start for this issue’s cover story, which follows Milton’s trajectory toward scientific vindication and reports that, yes, there’s plenty of room at the “Hotel Influenza” this winter. (If you’d like to check in, turn to the story on page 18 to learn about becoming a paid study participant.)
For something completely different, turn to page 30 for Karen Shih’s profile of Connie Chung ’69 on the eve of her memoir’s publication. Candid, vulnerable and funny, Chung talks about the double dose of racism and sexism she fended off on her way to the top of broadcast journalism. The ending, in which Shih explores how Chung inspired so many other Asian Americans, is especially poignant.
Finally, as we unpacked our tailgating gear for football season, writer Annie Krakower unpacked what a decade in the Big Ten Conference has done for sports at UMD. We recall the uproar when the shift was announced, but you might be surprised to learn how well the Terps have performed, in every sense.
Now excuse me while I hunt for my red and white pom-pom. I’ve got a Family Weekend game to attend.
Lauren Brown University Editor
Adviser
MARGARET HALL
Executive Director, Creative Strategies
Magazine Staff
LAUREN BROWN University Editor
JOHN T. CONSOLI ’86 Creative Director
VALERIE MORGAN Art Director
CHRIS CARROLL
ANNIE KRAKOWER
SALA LEVIN ’10
KAREN SHIH ’09
Writers
LAUREN BIAGINI
CHARLENE PROSSER CASTILLO Designers
STEPHANIE S. CORDLE Photographer
JANNA SINGER-BAEFSKY Digital Asset Manager/Archivist
RILEY N. SIMS PH.D. ’23
DYLAN SINGLETON ’13 Photography Assistants
JAGU CORNISH Production Manager
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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 nondiscrimination regarding race, color, religion, age, national origin, political affiliation, gender, sexual orientation or disability.
COVER
Illustration by Noma Bar
Driving Home Pride
Our Spring 2024 cover story prompted many alums to share notes and photos of their Terp plates, which we’ve turned into this collage. Read all the letters we received at terp.umd.edu.
I have attached a photo of my tag (bioterp). We moved from Maryland to North Carolina in 2004 but have a significant family history associated with the university, including my wife, Nancy ’93 and daughters Noelle ’03 and Chelsea ’08.
—JOHN KAPP ’70, M.S. ’74, PH.D. ’77, CONCORD, N.C.
I may hold the record of being the farthest and oldest from College Park to have a Terp license plate. It amazes me how many people have interacted with me in California upon seeing my plate. There are over 3,400 Maryland graduates in San Diego County, and I find that astonishing. Go Terps!
—BURT R. BONDY ’67, LA JOLLA, CALIF.
I have Maryland plates: mrterps, as in M.R. Ducks, a nod to the Eastern Shorethemed apparel store, and 4x4terp. Prior plates include 4 terps (Texas and
Oregon) and cmterpps (as in C.M. Ducks), lil terp and 5 terps (all Maryland).
—DALE BURNS ’70, CENTREVILLE, MD.
They missed my new plate (scitrp): #1 Science Terp representing the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences in Northern Virginia. Shark-infested waters among all those Cavalier, Hokie and Duke Dog alums.
—ROBERT INFANTINO, ASSOCIATE DEAN, COLLEGE OF COMPUTER, MATHEMATICAL, AND NATURAL SCIENCES, VIA LINKEDIN
A couple years ago I added a Terp plate to my electric vehicle (ev terp). The article following this one was about EVs. Felt like both were written for me!
—JOE OBER ’81, SILVER SPRING, MD.
I lived in Maryland for 29 years and in several other states where I purchased Terp vanity plates. I gave one of each pair of plates to RJ Bentley’s in College Park: 1986
(Maryland): m terps; 1988 (Connecticut): terps; 1991 (Texas): terps; and 1992 (New York): terps. I still have their mates. I would be glad to give them away to appropriate Terp supporters.
—MIKE DONAGHUE ’71, CHICAGO
Correction: The Spring 2024 “Driving Home Pride” cover story failed to attribute a quote from Gretchen Ricks ‘98, who said she enjoys getting honks for her GOTERPS plate. We regret the error.
WRITE TO US
We love to hear from readers. Send your feedback, insights, compliments—and, yes, complaints—to terpfeedback@umd.edu or to:
Terp magazine
Office of Marketing and Communications
7736 Baltimore Ave. College Park, MD 20742
“Enrolling at the University of Maryland has been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.”
IN
TERP LAY
“Relieving my mom from the financial strain of tuition and loans is a blessing beyond words .”
“This scholarship has opened up countless doors , opportunities and connections that I will forever be grateful for.”
“The community that I have built in this program is absolutely priceless .”
—MARYLAND PROMISE PROGRAM SCHOLARSHIP RECIPIENTS
The Clark Challenge for the Maryland Promise will establish a $100 million endowment to provide need-based scholarships to talented undergraduates in Maryland and the District of Columbia.
Gifts of any size to the Maryland Promise Program will be matched dollar for dollar. You can support deserving scholars now at promise.umd.edu
KAPP ’70, M.S. ’74, PH.D. ’77;
’72; JOE OBER ’81;
THOMPSON ’76
2 Terps Take Gold
FOR THE FIRST TIME, two UMD graduates won gold medals in the same Olympic Games.
Thea LaFond ’15 took gold in the triple jump in Paris, the first Olympic medal for the Caribbean nation of Dominica, with a mark of 15.02 meters.
“Sometimes you wonder if being from a small country means that you have less accessibility to resources,” LaFond told The Washington Post. “But we’ve been really big on (prioritizing) quality and just executing it.”
Alyssa Thomas ’14 helped the USA women’s basketball team capture its eighth straight Olympic gold medal with a 67-66 win over France. She averaged 3.8 points, 4.8 rebounds and 3.5 assists at the Games.
The pair became the 10th and 11th gold medalists in UMD history and the first former Terp student-athletes to win gold since women’s basketball legend Vicky Bullett in 1992.
Testudo on Tap
UMD Joins With Baltimore Brewery Co-founded by Alum to Offer New Beer
As a student, Adam Benesch ’98 shared his latest home brews with buddies on game days. Now, thanks to a new partnership between the University of Maryland and Union Craft Brewing, its co-founder and CEO is pouring frosty beers for the Terp community at large.
Testudo Premium Lager, which Benesch (below) describes as “a super drinkable, incredibly approachable, very flavorful” classic lager, is available at UMD athletic venues including SECU Stadium and the Xfinity Center, as well as retail locations throughout the DMV.
The partnership with the Baltimore brewery is also intended to provide internships and new learning opportunities for students studying in the fermentation science, marketing and other majors, while the Maryland mascot-
themed beer will eventually offer a fertile testbed for incorporating hops and barley from the state’s farms into a popular product. A portion of the proceeds will benefit the One Maryland Collective, an endeavor composed of fans, alums, businesses and charities that helps UMD student-athletes capitalize on their name, image and likeness (NIL).
“Partnering with Union Craft Brewing is a perfect union,” says Brian Ullmann, executive associate athletic director/chief strategy officer. “We are thrilled to offer Testudo Premium Lager to all of Terp Nation, at our events and across the DMV.”
For Benesch, whose father and siblings also attended the university, seeing UMD fans sipping beer he labored over at a game is bound to be an immense moment of pride.
“I remember at Camden Yards first walking into a baseball game and seeing people drinking one of our beers—I can’t wait for that moment at a Terps football game,” he says.
Benesch co-founded the brewery in Baltimore’s Hampden area in 2012 after the accounting major realized that instead of keeping track of others’ books, he’d rather apply his business skills to a new career. When Maryland law changed to allow beer sales in brewery taprooms, the company’s popularity surged, prompting a 2017 move about a half-mile north into a much larger brewing facility.
While still retaining a neighborhood feel at the brewery, Union’s distribution has expanded beyond Baltimore and now includes Washington, D.C., Northern Virginia and Delaware; the brewery expects to produce nearly 12,000 barrels of its various beers this year.
“We really think of ourselves as a mid-Atlantic brewery now,” Benesch says. “We’re less interested in shipping beers beyond our core region. We think there’s a lot of room for growth here, and we’re more focused on being who we are, being authentic as Marylanders.”
The partnership could be a boon for fermentation science students interested in the beverage-production side of the new major that also encompasses foods
and biofuels, says environmental science and technology Professor Frank Coale, who led its development.
“The fact that Union Craft Brewing now has this relationship with the university opens up a great opportunity for them to host interns at their facility, and for the interns it’s a chance to see the whole operation from raw materials to final product,” he says.
Benesch says the UMD-Union partnership hits what it aimed for: a product that draws on UMD pride while embodying the brewery’s quality goals.
“It’s instantly recognizable as a University of Maryland product, and also something that fans of Union Craft will recognize as our beer,” he says.—cc
Lab Awarded RecordSetting Research Contract of Up to $500M
THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND received a new contract with a $500 million ceiling from the Department of Defense to support the Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security (ARLIS) and its mission of tackling complex national security problems using a multidisciplinary approach. It’s the largest research contract in UMD’s history.
Located in UMD’s Discovery District, ARLIS is one of 15 designated Department of Defense University Affiliated Research Centers (UARC) and the only UARC dedicated to intelligence and security.
ARLIS bridges social and technical sciences to address national security needs, particularly in the areas of cognitive security, supply chains, technology engagement and insider risk. Its new one-year contract has four option years.
“We are so grateful to continue this collaboration with the Department of Defense, which has already yielded so many opportunities for faculty and students,” says UMD President Darryll J. Pines.
From Ashes to Awe
Students and Faculty Mark 20 Years of Excavating and Documenting Little-Known Ruins Near Pompeii
Perched above the glittering Bay of Naples, Stabiae was the vacation destination of choice for the who’s who of ancient Roman society. They’d flock to fabulous villas to host intellectual discussions, swim in the sea below and partake plentifully of the local wine, all while enjoying an unimpeded view of Mt. Vesuvius.
The partying came to a sudden end in the year 79, when the volcano erupted, releasing
toxic gases and boiling-hot ash that buried the resort area, its neighboring towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and thousands of their inhabitants.
Yet the details on how the Roman elite lived, entertained and decorated their lavish homes have come to light two millennia later through excavations and analysis of the site led by University of Maryland faculty and students. This summer marked the 20th anniversary of their work in Italy, and a new
book coming out next year will showcase their progress.
The unlikely project began with Leonardo Varone M.Arch. ’00, a native of the modern Italian city of Castellammare di Stabia. As a young boy, he had joined his father, who was a judge in Pompeii, along with a television crew and a nationally known reporter to see the ruins of the famous Villa of the Papyri in nearby Herculaneum. The vibrantly colored mosaics led to a love of Roman history.
But the villas of ancient Stabiae were, Varone says, “a second player” compared to those at Pompeii and Herculaneum. Visitors could wander up the cliff and ask a guard to show them around, but the site lacked any formal infrastructure. At UMD’s School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, his master’s thesis proposed turning the villas into an archaeological park, complete with a ticketing process, visitor’s center and transportation between the site and the modern city of 65,000 below.
Faculty members encouraged Varone to share his thesis with local government officials in C. di Stabia, who were excited about the prospect of increasing tourism to their town.
Above: For 20 years, UMD students and faculty members have been uncovering gardens and frescoes (left) as they’ve excavated and documented villas destroyed by Mt. Vesuvius’ eruption in the coastal Italian city of Stabiae.
“We succeeded in getting attention for tourism resources and a research focus to the site that might not have arrived otherwise.”
—MATTHEW BELL, PROFESSOR OF ARCHITECTURE
The roughly 72,000-square-foot site, with its dozen or so villas, had undergone prior excavations: In the 1700s, Swiss architect and engineer Karl Weber and Spanish military engineer Roque Joauín de Alcubierre, who was working for the Spanish king, dug up some of the site and made drawings of it, but the ruins were once again largely forgotten. In the 1950s, local scholar Liberio D’Orsi excavated rooms from the Villa San Marco and Villa Arianna.
In 2004, after several years of talks with Varone and the local government, UMD partnered with the Superintendency of Archaeology of Pompeii and the region of Campania to form the Restoring Ancient Stabiae Foundation (RAS). Through RAS, led on UMD’s end by Professor Emeritus Robert Lindley Vann, students and faculty began traveling to Italy each summer, excavating Villa Arianna and its gardens.
“The Italians were saying, ‘Jeez, if the Americans are interested, maybe we should devote some more resources to this,’” says Matthew Bell, a UMD professor of architecture who serves as vice president of RAS and was Varone’s thesis adviser. “We succeeded in getting attention for tourism resources and a research focus to the site that might not have arrived otherwise.”
Over time, the Terps—and groups from Yale, Columbia, Emory and nearly 80 other universities—revealed more than 100 walls covered in richly colored frescoes of Roman gods, people, geometric designs and gardens, and a more extensive section of the gardens themselves.
“It’s stunning,” says art history major Stephanie Korth ’25, who traveled to the site this summer. “Almost all the walls are preserved. We have remnants of stairs leading up to a second story. You can still see the figures and all the little decorations.”
The team has also found that villas’ owners had set up their homes for rites related to the secret societies they belonged to, including the famous initiation known as the Eleusinian Mysteries.
“There are discs that hang from the ceiling or between columns, and wreaths and animal skins,” says Joseph C. Williams, assistant professor of architectural history and current supervisor of the project. “In some cases, these artifacts have been preserved, and in others, they’re represented in the frescoes.”
Now the UMD team is focused on documenting the paintings, plantings and general architecture of the houses. That process includes making line drawings— illustrations of the walls that feature digital measurements made by scanners and lasers. These illustrations are more nuanced and precise than photographs, says Williams.
For Varone, now an architect in Washington, D.C., the growth of Stabiae is a victory. He has volunteered his time to the project, personally accompanied Stabiae’s most famous fresco, “Flora di Stabiae,” from Baltimore’s airport to the National Museum of Natural History for an exhibit in the mid-2000s, and has seen the number of visitors to the site rise from just a couple thousand each year to some 100,000.
“I did something well beyond my wildest imagination,” he says.—sl
In 2008, students excavated lapilli, button-sized droplets of molten lava, from Villa Arianna’s garden.
Farm to Table, UMD Style
Terp Farm Celebrates 10 Years of Growing Fresh Produce for Campus
n a surprisingly breezy July morning, Laila Wilson ’26 (right) and Ty Stanick ’27 pull red twine along rows of Roma tomatoes, securing the growing plants as their oblong fruits inch toward marinara readiness. Fields of corn sway behind them, and up the hill, former tobacco barns stand starkly white against the blue sky, containing crates of Napa cabbage and fat bulbs of garlic hanging to cure.
OSoon, these products will appear on the plates of students in the dining halls as red sauces, pesto-coated chicken and tangy kimchi, all from UMD’s Terp Farm.
Students appreciate knowing where their food comes from, says Wilson, an architecture major with an interest in urban and community farming. “Helping to feed people on campus is really rewarding.”
That’s what Terp Farm has done for 10 years, providing vegetables and herbs to Dining Services for the dining halls, catering services and the Campus Pantry.
Piloted in 2014 with a Sustainability Fund grant, the farm started as a two-acre plot in Upper Marlboro, Md., part of the 210-acre Central Maryland Research and Education Center (CMREC) operated by the College of
Agriculture and Natural Resources. Terp Farm has since expanded to use up to 10 acres each year.
Farm Manager Guy Kilpatric initially tried more than 90 varieties of vegetables, such as peppers, beets, head lettuce and heirloom tomatoes.
“The culinary team was very excited, very complimentary about the quality,” he says. But producing 20 pounds of salad mix was barely enough to supply one of UMD’s three dining halls for even a day. If the goal was to educate students about the source of their food, offering a dish just once a semester wouldn’t register. “How do you message around that?”
Kilpatric realized he had to narrow it down. Today, basil is the farm’s top crop. It grows well during the summer, when the Dining Services team has time to turn it into pesto, and can be stored for use throughout the school year in pasta, sandwiches, roasted dishes and more, labeled clearly as “Terp Farm Pesto.”
Its products have now gained a reputation: When Dining Services
ran out of the 15,000 pounds of Terp Farm-supplied tomatoes by mid-October last year and switched to another source, students noticed and wrote in, asking what had changed.
Other main crops are sweet potatoes, winter squashes and daikon radishes, as well as spring mix grown in tunnel-like greenhouses called hoop houses.
Throughout the school year, Kilpatric is the only staff member dedicated to the farm full-time. He collaborates with CMREC staff led by Donald Murphy and relies on partnerships with volunteer groups that come each Saturday, such as the Alpha Phi Omega service fraternity, Terps for Change and College Park Scholars. A Do Good Institute grant will support a new cohort of interns to help out this year.
Terp Farm also has four full-time student workers each summer, essential for tasks like hand-planting 5,000 sweet potato vines or building the hoop houses to protect delicate crops. Most are from the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, especially plant science and environmental science and technology majors, including Stanick, an Institute of Applied Agriculture certificate program student.
He’d grown sunflowers and strawberries with his grandmother in their tiny New York City backyard, “but I’ve never had to weed before!” he says. That’s one of the toughest parts of the job, which often starts at 6 or 7 a.m. to beat the heat.
Terp Farm is also used for research, examining rainwater harvesting for urban farms or insect relationships with crops, as well as for classes. Some take place annually, such as “Introduction to Sustainable Agriculture” and “Fruit and Vegetable Technology,” while others do more one-off field trips to learn about nutrient budgeting or use it as a capstone study location.
Kilpatric hopes to expand Terp Farm’s scope with more student employees and greater production, planting crops like rainbow carrots and beets, as well as flowers to sell at the UMD Farmers Market. “I want the farm to be award-winning, nationally recognized and a model for the really cool campus farm programs out there.”—ks
Sustainable Developments
Grant Program Greens Campus
FOR TODAY’S TERPS, scraping stir-fry scraps into compost bins at the Stamp Student Union, picking up free lamps and cereal bowls from the Terp to Terp ReUse Store and swimming in a moss-filtered pool at Eppley Recreation Center are part of everyday life.
That’s thanks to the Sustainability Fund, which has funded nearly 300 environmentally friendly projects over the past 15 years.
“It’s really rewarding to see how these new initiatives have become successful,” says Scott Lupin, director of the Office of Sustainability. “They’ve grown from grassroots to become part of the culture of campus.”
Students, faculty and staff can apply each year for a grant to support sustainability-related research, internships and operational improvements. The fund has increased as the Student Government Association has voted to raise student fees; next year, a record $850,000 in grants will be disbursed.—KS High-impact projects include:
Slowing the flow of water as it heads toward the Anacostia River and stabilizing the creek bed have improved the region’s water quality and led to the return of wildlife like fish and toads.
FOOD RECOVERY NETWORK
A student idea to collect unserved food from dining halls and donate it to local shelters received a small grant over a decade ago. Now, the initiative operates on 195 campuses and has recovered more than 16.5 million pounds of food.
TERP TO TERP REUSE STORE
This project collects gently used dorm essentials like lamps and storage solutions to pass on to other students for free—and keeps the items out of landfills.
TERPS HEART THE TAP
Long before Stanley cups went viral, a grant supported the installation of filtered water-filling stations across campus. Now, there are more than 100, preventing the use of millions of single-use plastic water bottles.
CAMPUS CREEK RESTORATION
Book Throws Jab at Art of Black Boxers
Researcher Reveals How Stereotypes Were Reinforced
n george bellows’ famous 1909 painting, “Both Members of This Club” (right), two prizefighters—one white, one Black—are locked in an intense struggle. The Black boxer looks to be winning, his powerful back curving over his white opponent, whose face and arms drip blood.
IThough many art historians and critics have considered the artwork a daring representation of a victorious Black fighter, a new book by Jordana Moore Saggese argues that the painting—whose original title contained a racist slur—reflects widespread fears about Black people.
“Through the way Bellows paints this boxer, he becomes threatening, an aberration, a blob, this indiscriminate threat,” says Saggese, professor of modern and contemporary art as well as director of the David C. Driskell Center. “He has no face.”
“The book is about imploring people to look beyond what they think of as iconic images of sport to what they might reveal about Black bodies in the public sphere,” says Saggese.
Boxing’s popularity in the 19th century rose alongside the proliferation of print media, making it a favorite topic of many artists. The sport, which predated football and basketball as a phenomenon, created the country’s earliest Black athletes.
nude, on the cover of a national newspaper, he was compared with the classical marble statue Apollo Belvedere, sparking debates about which was the more beautiful man.
One of boxing’s most famous images, the 1965 photograph of Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston during the world heavyweight title fight, also echoes neoclassical art, says Saggese.
In “Heavyweight: Black Boxers and the Fight for Representation,” she examines artistic depictions of Black boxers from the 19th through 21st centuries, revealing how their renderings reflected and reinforced stereotypes about Black men’s physicality, celebrity, power and place in the United States.
Racist fears about Black boxers emerged in images. Jack Johnson, crowned the first Black world heavyweight boxing champion in 1908, was “reduced to monkey images, shown eating fried chicken and watermelon” to diminish his strength—not just as a boxer, but as a representative of Black men, says Saggese.
Other boxers were celebrated rather than vilified. When late 19th-century fighter Peter Jackson was pictured from behind, fully
“You have this pyramidal composition of the figures, someone standing in the center of the frame very dramatically lit, elevated on stage. It looks very similar to 19th-century history paintings.”
For many Americans, she says, images of Black athletes remain the primary depiction of Black people in public life, making it essential to understand their impact. “Images of athletes are integral to our wider visual and cultural history of Black people in America,” she says.—sl
Leveling Up Gender Diversity
Women’s, Nonbinary Esports Teams Change the Game in Conference Competitions
CAREBEAR, CARROTS, LUNAROUSE, Soap, Tuxedosam and Jiraffe might sound like a cute, cuddly crew. That is, until they expertly dodge enemy fire, neutralize explosives and slay their adversaries.
Playing the character-based, firstperson shooter video game Valorant, the headset-wearing members of UMD’s Team Lilac crushed Northern Virginia Community College, 3-0, in the Fall 2023 National Esports Collegiate Conference Mideast Championship. The women’s and nonbinary team—one of two competing under Terps Esports—hopes to step further into the male-dominated space this fall, as the Big Esports Conference (BEC), made up of Big Ten institutions, begins hosting competitions for marginalized genders.
“Winning that opened many eyes,” says Saima Ahmad ’26, who goes by the gamertag Carebear. “Just because we’re women doesn’t mean we’re not good at esports.”
Only around 8% of the estimated 5,000 varsity college esports competitors in the
U.S. are women, and 5% of professional gamers are female. Research suggests that stereotyping and hostile gaming environments, including insults and cussing, perpetuate the underrepresentation.
Ahmad and Aayush Nepal ’23, a UMD Valorant player and captain while a student, organized tryouts for a women’s and nonbinary team last fall. Based on how 13 gamers worked together to plant or defuse the game’s explosive “spike,” Nepal split them into two teams, Lilac and Lotus.
“It’s very cool that we were able to have two teams, because it’s very hard to find women and nonbinary players, period,” says Nepal, aka Dustyyxo, who’s now the coach of both squads. They started out as part of the Gaming at UMCP club, then last spring joined the more official Terps Esports program, home of UMD’s premier-level teams in games like Valorant, Overwatch and Fortnite since 2022. They hope to add a women’s and nonbinary Rocket League team to the mix this year. Players practice several days a week either virtually or in Ritchie Coliseum, scrimmaging and conducting “VOD (video-on-demand) reviews” to analyze past competitions—much like rolling back game film.
“There are so many more things that a team can improve on that aren’t raw skill,” says Soomin “Carrots” Kim ’26, who guided Lilac’s decision-making as in-game leader. “As we’ve practiced, I have been able to naturally play off some of my teammates without even having to
say anything. We just know each other’s play style.”
While other esports tournaments don’t restrict women and nonbinary players, having specific competitions for their teams in the conference will spotlight their accomplishments and foster camaraderie, says Erin “Gojo” Maynard ’26, who was a member of Team Lotus.
“When you’re playing with men, a lot of times (you’re) not treated the best, unfortunately,” she says. Women’s and nonbinary tournaments are “just a really great place to bond with other people who have shared interests with you and just to feel safe doing what you love.”—AK
Esports Elite
Besides Lilac and Lotus, two varsity, or “premier,” Terps Esports teams powered their way to success last season:
VALORANT
• Fall 2023 NECC Mideast Championship
• Spring 2024 NECC Mideast Championship
OVERWATCH
• Spring 2024 NECC Mideast Championship
• First annual Big Esports Conference tournament champion
• 2024 NECC national championship title
Learn more at esports.umd.edu.
A New Reflection on History
Physicist Who Helped Send Mirrors to Moon on Apollo 11 Prepares to Launch an Improved Model
In july 1969, four faculty members traveled from College Park to Kennedy Space Center in Florida to provide last-minute instruction to a noteworthy pupil: an Apollo 11 astronaut about to become one of the first humans to set foot beyond Earth.
Just days later, lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin would be following mission commander Neil Armstrong onto the moon’s surface to deploy a UMD-led experiment. The suitcase-size array of retroreflectors— painstakingly crafted hunks of glass able
to reflect light directly back to its source from any angle—would serve as a target for powerful lasers on Earth and provide the first accurate measurements of the distance between the planet and its satellite. In a meeting with Aldrin, then-Assistant Professor Douglas Currie, an expert in laser light, asked if the former fighter pilot with a Ph.D. in astronautics had any questions.
At a later lunar workshop, Currie recalls, Aldrin scoffed about the procedural instructions, “Ahh, it was so easy I decided I could give it to Armstrong.”
But the wisecracking astronaut had done his homework, and for the last 55 years, that array and two more placed by successive Apollo missions have yielded a wealth of data for NASA’s Lunar Laser Ranging experiment, helping scientists detect our moon’s liquid core, bolstering Einstein’s theory of general relativity and providing a better understanding of the evolution of the Earth-moon system, among other discoveries.
Now the university is about to do it again with the launch of the Next
Generation Lunar Retroflector, scheduled for later this fall. This time, Currie is principal investigator, a position held on the Apollo 11 project by the late physics Professor Carroll Alley.
There are no astronauts to train for this mission; the chunky “corner cube” retroreflector will arrive aboard an uncrewed craft launched by the company Firefly Aerospace as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program and remain atop the lander for its operational life. (Subsequent reflectors to be developed by NASA with UMD’s help, based on Currie’s general design, are expected to be set up by astronauts in NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to return to the moon later this decade.)
“When NASA announced back in 2004
they were going back to the moon, I said that instead of an array of 100, we need to have one big one, and I’ve been playing with that since then,” says Currie, now a professor emeritus and senior research scientist in the Department of Physics.
He and NASA hope the next-gen device boosts precision in distance measurements by perhaps a factor of 30, from several centimeters of uncertainty to less than one millimeter.
“A lot of what we’re looking to do today builds directly on what was done more than 50 years ago .”
—STEPHEN MERKOWITZ, SPACE GEODESY PROJECT MANAGER, NASA
The imprecision of the current device stems from the fact that observers watching from the ground don’t know if a laser pulse bounces back from a reflector on the near corner or the far corner of the array, which are at slightly different and constantly changing distances from the ground because of the moon’s slight back-and-forth movement relative to Earth. Having just one mirror removes uncertainty, Currie says. The new setup will also have the advantage of being shiny and new. Though still functional, evidence suggests the Apollo 11 mission array is significantly blocked by lunar dust; calculations suggest the new device will be 10 times as bright as the current arrays, says Stephen Merkowitz, who’s overseeing lunar laser ranging as Space Geodesy Project manager at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
Solving these problems will contribute to another one, however. The hefty chunk of glass making up the new single retroreflector mirror soaks up and sheds more heat during frigid lunar nights and blazing days, creating a greater possibility for temperature gradients and distorted reflections. Currie and his partners at the National Laboratories of Frascati in Italy
worked to minimize that with the retroreflector’s housing design.
“A lot of what we’re looking to do today builds directly on what was done more than 50 years ago, so Doug’s experience working on Apollo is valuable in the present,” Merkowitz says.
Currie chuckles looking at a photo he keeps in his office in the Physics Building: It shows Aldrin strolling across the moon, swinging the original UMD mirror array in one hand and another priceless experiment in another. Times have changed.
“Now we’re told the astronauts have to carry it in both hands, even though it weighs only a fraction of what Buzz was carrying,” he says. “They want you to do one thing at a time, I guess.” —cc
Moonwalk practice in Arizona? Meet the professor overseeing safety testing for NASA’s Artemis mission to the moon at go.umd.edu/back2moon.
Currie’s modern mirror design awaits thermal testing in a chamber at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
Left: During the Apollo II mission, astronaut Buzz Aldrin carries experiments including a lunar reflector designed by Douglas Currie (left) and other UMD faculty.
Below: In an undated photo, Currie (seated) discusses the project with astronauts and astronomers at the McDonald Observatory in Texas.
UMD Casts HydroNet to Predict, Prepare for Floods
AMID ANNAPOLIS’ PICTURESQUE
Colonial-era buildings, brick-lined streets and sailboats gliding along the Severn River, a small solar-powered sensor perched atop a pylon just off City Dock is easy to miss.
The modest device, though, is the star of a new UMD project to track water levels in a city all too familiar with flooding. The Maryland HydroNet will be a series of more than 20 sensors along the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries that pump out data to help researchers and local government leaders predict when, where and how much flooding will occur.
“Projects such as the HydroNet are really the best symbol for what institutions of higher education like the University of Maryland can help accomplish,” UMD President Darryll J. Pines said during a June unveiling event with local leaders.
Led by atmospheric and oceanic science Associate
Professor Tim Canty, the HydroNet is part of the university’s Climate Resilience Network, funded by a UMD Grand Challenges Grant to prepare communities for the impacts of climate change.
“This project is the first step in providing the state with a larger network of water-level monitors to help better allocate resources and prioritize assistance for communities facing the most imminent risk,” Canty says.—ALLISON EATOUGH ’97
Glowing “Gem of the University”
Maryland’s Little-Known Nuclear Reactor Observes a Half-Century of Fission
ech-minded terps can reel off some marquee research facilities that dot the campus—the historic Glenn L. Martin Wind Tunnel, the 367,000-gallon Neutral Buoyancy Research Facility built to support NASA operations, the quantum labs buried deep beneath several campus buildings. But one important site almost certainly not on those lists is UMD’s nuclear reactor, which this past summer quietly marked its 50th anniversary.
TIt has trained hundreds of students in reactor operations and provided radiation for countless experiments and tests. And, just maybe, it inspired America’s most famous fictional nuclear technician, Homer Simpson. (The late engineering Professor Joseph Silverman, who helped develop the reactor, is the father of a longtime animator/director of “The Simpsons,” David Silverman.)
But don’t have a cow. If the Maryland University Training Reactor (MUTR) resembled the TV series’ mishap-prone nuclear plant, federal nuclear safety officials wouldn’t have recently used it—the closest reactor to the U.S. Capitol—as a showcase and tour site for visiting international dignitaries.
“This is a gem of the university, and really, it’s a national resource,” says Timothy Koeth, assistant professor of materials science and engineering and MUTR director from 2013-19. When he took over as director, campus and
A. James Clark School of Engineering administrators were weighing closure of the reactor since the nuclear engineering major ended more than a decade earlier.
Part of a class of reactors designed to be safe enough for student trainees to control, UMD’s version doesn’t generate electricity and is a pipsqueak compared to typical nuclear power plants. Even compared to the 23 other U.S. university research reactors, MUTR has just 1/40th the power of the largest. (An earlier UMD reactor was even less potent but used now-forbidden highly enriched uranium.)
Koeth saw potential for teaching and research, and reinstated a reactor operator training program. Since 2015, it has graduated 15 students, many of whom have gone on to nuclear industry careers.
The Clark School’s nuclear engineering minor heavily relies on MUTR; with interest growing in advanced nuclear power
Ghostly blue radiation emerges from the UMD reactor core as charged particles move faster than light through water that cools it. At bottom, an operator mans the controls in MUTR’s early days.
technologies, participation has surged from seven students in 2020 to 30 this fall, says Amber Johnson, current nuclear reactor and radiation facilities director.
“Younger people seem to be oriented toward thinking about climate change, and how nuclear power can help prevent it,” she says.
Operating on its original fuel, MUTR still develops about 60% of its maximum rated power of 250 kilowatts. In a highly choreographed and federally scrutinized operation, staffers brought in new fuel rods in 2017, storing them in the reactor tank—6,000 gallons of water that cools the core while the reactor is in operation. After technical and pandemic-related delays, the team plans to bring it back up to full power with a refueling operation this winter, followed by a new cooling system so the reactor can operate more hours per day.
Mike Hottinger, radiation systems manager, points to the towering, red-painted concrete structure in the middle of a room in the Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Building that houses the reactor pool and core. “It can easily go another 50 years.”—cc
ASK THE EXPERT ADVICE FOR REAL LIFE
How to Zap Your Phone-Charging Phobias
SOME OF US FEEL powerless to resist plugging in the moment our phone battery drops below 90%. Others can’t be bothered until our charge is in the single digits. (Usually, these people marry one another.)
Either way, are your charging habits keeping your phone’s battery in good shape? Michael Pecht is a Distinguished University Professor of mechanical engineering and founder of the Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering, which focuses on product durability. Here, he offers tips on getting the most out of your cell phone’s battery.—SL
DON’T BE OS-OBSESSED. Green bubbles or blue bubbles don’t make a difference, says Pecht. Any namebrand phone running on an Apple or Android operating system is going to have a well-developed battery management system, which monitors the battery’s temperature and performance.
DON’T WORRY ABOUT REACHING 100% . The higher you charge, the faster your battery’s lifespan fades. You may have noticed that getting up to around 80% is quick work, but the
final 20% seems to take hours. That last bit is what degrades the battery, Pecht says, so don’t think twice about unplugging before you hit triple digits. (In fact, most current batteries aren’t operating at 100% charge even if they say they are—phones are programmed to generally avoid such topping off, he says.)
TAKE ADVANTAGE OF OPTIMIZED CHARGING. This nifty trick, which the latest iPhones do automatically unless told not to, learns based on your habits when you’re going to do your longest charging session—like overnight. It’ll pace its charging so that you don’t exceed that 80% threshold.
DON’T CONFUSE A SLUGGISH BATTERY WITH A DEAD ONE. Cell phone manufacturers “have this screwy definition of end of life,” says Pecht—typically when your battery fades to about 70 or 80% of its capacity. But your phone will still work fine: “You just have to charge it more often.”
An Insider’s Look at a Prison’s Imprint
Criminologist, Once Convicted, Studies Ripple Effects of Legal System Involvement
ON THE LAST DAY of Assistant Professor Robert Stewart’s “Courts and Sentencing” class, he reveals a familiarity with the topic that’s more than academic: He has a felony record and once served two years in prison.
“It’s easy to sensationalize because of TV shows, so it’s important to put a real human face on the experiences,” he says.
Today, the criminologist studies the social, political and economic effects of criminal legal involvement, from the pitfalls of background checks, which can hinder people from getting jobs and housing, to parenting consequences, such as being banned from volunteering at school.
Stewart shares what landed him in prison, why he discloses his own criminal record and why policymakers should rethink taking away voting rights.—KS
How did you become incarcerated?
I grew up in a small town in southern Minnesota. Although I did well in school early on, I got involved with drinking and using drugs—and later selling drugs—in high school. In my 20s, I was arrested a few times for possession and eventually sentenced to serve 25 months in prison plus parole.
How did you go from being convicted to studying the consequences of criminal records?
In prison, I had the opportunity to earn a few credits through an in-prison college program, and enrolled at a community college after my
release. I then started the application to transfer to the University of Minnesota, but when, on the last page of the application, it asked if I had ever been convicted of a crime, I was stunned and surprised.
Although I eventually submitted it (and jumped through several hoops before I was accepted), that experience stuck with me. This inspired my dissertation project, in which I fielded an audit experiment to test whether criminal records can be a barrier to college. I found that applicants with records were three times as likely to be rejected.
Why are you relatively open about your felony, and how does that connect to your research?
Representation is important. Our criminology department includes former Justice Department officials, federal prosecutors and police chiefs, which is great. But there is also a lot to learn from the experiences of people who have been
subjected to these systems.
I don’t believe my expertise comes from my lived experiences, but rather my doctoral training. However, my experiences do inform my research questions and interpretations, just like my colleagues’ experiences inform theirs.
As the presidential election nears, what do you want people to know about felons and voting rights?
The last decade has featured the largest expansion of voting rights, likely since Reconstruction. I joined the Sentencing Project in 2022, and we’ve estimated the total number of Americans who couldn’t vote because of a felony record has decreased by 25% since 2016 to 4.4 million in 2022.
I urge people to consider what value there is in stripping someone of their right to vote on top of their criminal sentences. People vote because they care about their communities, and I believe we should encourage that.
FACULTY Q&A
ROBERT STEWART
Clear “View” of Road Dangers
From Sidewalks to Streetlights, Common Features Shown in Google’s Tech Linked to Crash Frequency
Most people use Google Street View to help find their way, but University of Maryland researchers employed it in a new study to locate spots where your journey might abruptly end.
In the recent study in the British Medical Journal of Injury Prevention, the research team analyzed the service’s 360-degree views with artificial intelligence tools to identify road-related features linked to collisions involving
as fatal and nonfatal crashes using Washington, D.C., traffic data.
They found sidewalks and streetside greenery correlated to fewer collisions, while roadwork had the opposite effect—an indication of how policymakers can use data to solve public health problems, says Quynh Nguyen, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics who led the study.
“Car crashes are the leading cause of death for young people between 5 and 29 years old, so it’s crucial to
System Could Derail Video Fakes, Deep or Shallow
IN THE EARLY DAYS of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appeared in a video telling his soldiers to lay down their arms and surrender. At least, that’s what it looked like.
The clip was a high-tech deception, illustrating a danger that University of Maryland researchers are fighting with a new system designed to ferret out video and audio that have been altered to create a “deepfake” or a harder-to-spot “shallowfake,” which changes only a few keywords or images.
“The gap between a generated video and real video is getting smaller,” says computer science Assistant Professor Nirupam Roy, who developed the new TalkLock system with Ph.D. student Irtaza Shahid. “There’s a good chance that in three or four years, the detection method used now will be impossible.”
To “lock” their talk, speakers display an ever-changing QR code on a phone or other screen alongside themselves as they’re recorded on video. The system “listens,” and embeds elements of the speech in the code. Viewers can later scan the code to verify authenticity of any part of the video, even if it’s posted in a different format or on a different platform.
The video requirement means TalkLock isn’t usable in many situations, Roy says, but future versions could replace visible QR codes with audio signals beyond human hearing to broaden its applicability.
S. CORDLE;
BY CHRIS CARROLL ILLUSTRATIONS BY NOMA BAR
WELCOME TO THE
Influenza Hotel
A GROUNDBREAKING UMD RESEARCHER INVESTIGATING HOW RESPIRATORY INFECTIONS SPREAD ASKS VOLUNTEERS TO CHECK IN—AND GET SICK FOR SCIENCE.
THE STATELY 23-STORY HOTEL OPENED AT the height of the Jazz Age, but less than a year later, Wall Street’s 1929 crash snuffed out revelry in the opulent ballroom and secret speakeasy. That’s when the property, then one of Baltimore’s tallest buildings, supposedly began accumulating ghosts: failed businessmen, wiped-out tycoons, even a bankrupt couple reputed to have jumped to their deaths on a downtown street with their young daughter.
Today, as tour groups try to detect the spectral child bouncing her ball down the halls of the hotel, University of Maryland researchers and colleagues are using the location to track an unseen presence that’s more substantial—and threatening.
Each year, according to the World Health Organization, seasonal influenza respiratory infections kill up to 650,000 people; while science has pinned down much of the biology of flu and other dangerous viruses, it hasn’t yet provided a precise account of how they’re passed from person to person to cause illness— or clear answers about preventing their spread. Did you get flu from a dirty doorknob or a sneeze in the face? Or as recent
research from UMD and other sources suggests, do airborne viruses “haunt” indoor air around infected people, waiting to be breathed deep into the lungs?
As part of an audacious bid to put such questions to rest, paid volunteers have checked into a sealed-off floor of the hotel (which the managers asked Terp to avoid naming) over the past two winters, with more on the way this winter. During stays of up to two weeks, they’re participating in a randomized, controlled trial with a surprising objective: to spread, or catch, the flu for science.
Supported by $20 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health and Balvi Filantropic Fund, the study could fundamentally alter how health authorities and the public fight respiratory infections. It brings together a multidisciplinary team from UMD’s School of Public Health and A. James Clark School of Engineering, and the School of Medicine at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, led by UMD MPower Professor of Environmental and Occupational Health Donald K. Milton.
He has spent much of his 40-year career analyzing airborne pathogens and advocating, at times controversially, for society to take greater precautions. It took the COVID pandemic—when he played a pivotal role in overturning national and global health authorities’ opposition to masking to stop airborne viruses—for his ideas to gain greater traction. But that was a little too late to avoid disastrous shutdowns of schools and other societal institutions.
“I tried to find a way to avoid this calamity, but here we are,” he told Terp in mid-2020. “Maybe this tragedy will get us past our fear of the idea of airborne transmission and prepare to control it, which could help us to avoid all this next time.”
Midway through his flu study, Milton finds himself in the odd spot of rooting for a virus—within the walls of the hotel— that he’s fought for decades.
INVISIBLE THREAT
Indoor air is about 90% of all the air most of us breathe, Milton says, so he frequently keeps track of what’s in his. In his office in the School of Public Health Building, Milton reaches over and plops a device on his desk reminiscent of a small digital clock. At the beginning of our interview, the big number on its LCD screen reads a little over 400, but some 45 minutes later, the number has risen dramatically. Our breath as we spoke boosted carbon dioxide in the room to nearly 700 parts per million.
While the CO2 concentration itself is not a health hazard— even at much higher concentrations, like at a 2022 Maryland
Public Health Association meeting he attended that had levels well over 2,000 parts per million—it’s a worrying sign. The amount of CO2 in the air indicates the risk of infectious viruses floating around, according to a mathematical model Milton proposed with the late Stephen Rudnick of Harvard Medical School in an influential 2003 paper rejected by Science but published in Indoor Air.
Respiratory disease has shadowed Milton’s life. He grew up in the Baltimore area in the 1950s and ’60s, when factories and mills still crowded Sparrows Point and other parts of the city and belched pollution into the air far thicker than any hovering around Charm City today. As children, he and his two sisters watched their mother struggle with bronchiectasis, a condition that involves recurring, painful bouts of bronchitis and airway infection, and caused her death in 1995. “I think I may have gravitated toward studying respiratory issues from wondering as a child why my mother couldn’t get out of bed, what we could do to help her.”
He graduated from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and later earned a doctorate in public health from Harvard. While serving as a practicing physician in environmental and occupational medicine, Milton began focusing on indoor air quality.
One tragedy in particular—the death of a woman who had been among several workers in a badly ventilated room who developed adult-onset asthma—galvanized his direction in medicine and public health. Her body was discovered in her home, clutching a rescue inhaler.
“That indelible image and the failure of medical treatments to save my patient keeps me focused on the importance of indoor air,” he says.
CLEARING THE AIR
Many prominent physicians (not to mention the disinfecting wipe industry—“kills 99.9% of viruses and bacteria!”) still hew to the idea that the primary routes of infection are through the spray of a sneeze or cough directly into the face, or onto a surface to be transferred by touch to the mouth, eyes or nose.
The developing idea that “aerosols,” fine particles that can remain suspended in the air for considerable periods, can hold enough exhaled virus to cause infection was increasingly bringing Milton into conflict with the medical establishment.
One of Milton’s papers, which examined the possibilities of airborne smallpox soon after the 2001 attacks with the deadly anthrax bacteria when there was concern about bioweapons in Iraq, was met with livid responses from reviewers, including charges he was a “quack and a charlatan,” he says.
“IT’S DOGMA, NOT SCIENCE. I’M ALLERGIC TO DOGMA.”
—MPOWER PROFESSOR
DONALD MILTON
To prove his point about what’s in the air, he developed a machine, which he named Gesundheit II (above); the vaguely steampunk assemblage of tubes and gauges leads to a Victrolalike horn into which visitors to his Public Health AeroBiology Laboratory stick their faces so the machine can capture their breaths and extract viruses. In a 2013 study published in PloS Pathogens, he used it to demonstrate flu virus could be captured from infected people’s breath and cultivated. The paper also showed that surgical masks reduced the amount of influenza virus escaping into the air from an infected person by 70%.
A past collaborator of Milton’s, Raymond Tellier, an associate professor and microbiologist at McGill University in Montreal, says the backlash against Milton in part stems from scientific disputes stretching back to the early 20th century, when doctors fought unscientific beliefs about “miasma,” or unhealthy night air thought to cause everything from cholera to the bubonic plague. The idea led to measures that encouraged disease, such as buildings designed to prevent ventilation with outside air; while such thinking has been universally rejected, its echoes remain, he says.
“The idea of aerosols with virus particles was being lumped together with the old reaction against the miasma theory,” says Tellier, who adds that today those who refuse to consider Milton’s ideas are the ones ignoring science.
Milton also attributes some of the reaction to hospital administrators’ unwillingness to swallow the cost of air cleaning or issuing masks that are more protective—and
expensive—than surgical masks. But the resistance is underlain by the idea that “this is how we’ve always done it,” he says.
“It’s dogma, not science,” he says. “I’m allergic to dogma.”
As the COVID-19 pandemic began, Milton watched with dismay as his work seemed to have little effect on what medical and public health authorities were telling people; masking was initially widely dismissed, and social distancing, handwashing and even wiping down supermarket purchases were presented as the best means to stay COVID-free.
But in March 2020, Milton and several co-authors posted a paper online that was soon published in Nature Medicine. The study used Gesundheit II to confirm that surgical masks could stop coronaviruses as well as influenza when worn by infected people. Its impact was life-changing for much of the world: Mask use soon became widespread—even mandatory in many places—perhaps signaling a growing open-mindedness about the route of transmission Milton had been focused on for two decades. He quickly became a standby source for journalists covering COVID-19 and other respiratory infections, spoke to the White House and Congress, and served on an increasing number of global public health advisory boards.
“Although his contributions are now widely recognized, Don has not received the accolades that he has deserved,” says Jonathan M. Samet, professor and former dean of the Colorado School of Public Health. “It took a pandemic … for his work to finally receive an appropriate level of attention, given its implications.”
HIGH-RISK, HIGH-REWARD
Milton’s latest major study began in 2021 with $15 million in funding from the National Institutes for Health, although fieldwork at the hotel didn’t kick off until late 2022. For the first time, it joins a full range of scientific elements and expertise to document in detail a flu transmission, says Professor Jelena Srebric, the Margaret G. and Frederick H. Kohloss Chair in Mechanical Engineering, an expert in indoor air quality and computational fluid dynamics, and one of Milton’s co-principal investigators.
“Of course, you can’t actually see individual viruses causing someone to be infected, but the design of this study will give more understanding of every step along the way than we have ever had before,” Srebric says. “We’ll know what made you sick and what didn’t make you sick.”
Unlike other controlled trials of virus transmission, the hotel-based one calls for flu recipients to quarantine in their rooms—reading, working remotely, watching TV—when they’re not being intentionally exposed to infected flu “donors.” Previous hospital-based studies that discount the importance of airborne transmission didn’t take steps to ensure people weren’t picking up the virus at home or elsewhere. As a result, they mean little, Milton contends.
In the Baltimore hotel study, participants are brought together in a common room at intervals throughout the day to play cards and board games, do yoga or belt out renditions of “Baby Got Back” and “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” from Disney’s “Mulan” in karaoke. Among other tightly controlled factors, Srebric and colleagues are testing different room ventilation rates to see if cleaner air results in fewer infections via
“IT TOOK A PANDEMIC FOR HIS WORK TO FINALLY RECEIVE AN APPROPRIATE LEVEL OF ATTENTION, GIVEN ITS IMPLICATIONS.”
the airborne route.
To examine other modes of infection, randomly chosen participants use hand sanitizer and wear face shields to prevent viruses from being propelled into their nose, eyes or mouth from coughs or sneezes, and to prevent them from touching their faces; others are unprotected. All participants are then instructed to pass digital devices and other common objects around to test touch as a route of infection.
Constant rapid PCR testing, using machines donated by the Balvi Filantropic Fund, keeps track of who has the flu and who doesn’t, while the Gesundheit II allows researchers to measure how much virus donors put in the air; molecular sequencing at NIH tracks what strain virus donors bring in.
A team led by School of Medicine Professor Wilbur Chen, an infectious disease physician-scientist, oversees the medical testing while keeping constant tabs on the well-being of participants; another led by mechanical engineering Professor Don Devoe focuses on creating novel testing devices and technology for analyzing airborne viruses.
In another element of the experiment funded by the Balvi gift, which invests widely in respiratory infectious disease research, the researchers will test whether a new type of germicidal ultraviolet light devices prevents infections. That would support the theory that the flu virus is transmitted in room air and provide a silent and energy-efficient way to sanitize indoor air.
All told, the extremely complex project could change how the world thinks about infection, or it could go off the rails. In the experiment’s first year, an unusually early flu season struck before the team was ready to quarantine participants; last year saw several flu donors, but with a dearth of recipients—just 11 in total, despite room for nearly 50—the illness hung back in the shadows like a shy ghost.
Researchers and students from Milton’s lab test technology used to track participants in the flu study’s common room by playing a dancing video game.
—PROFESSOR JONATHAN M. SAMET, COLORADO SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH
No volunteer recipients tested positive for the flu virus during quarantine, although one later showed chemical markers of an infection in a blood test. And in an illustration of the challenges of human studies, another participant who developed mild symptoms despite testing negative never returned to confirm whether they had been infected.
Ironically, to better fight the flu, the research team needs the flu to do better this winter.
“We are going to do everything we can, so all those hotel rooms are filled,” Milton says. “The point is to get more people exposed for more time.”
A former colleague at Harvard Medical School uninvolved with the current study says Milton’s scientific reputation and
administrative abilities helped him secure funding for a type of study that is rare in the world of science.
“It says something about Don that he’s able to launch these human-to-human transmission clinical trials,” says Edward Nardell, a physician who specializes in tuberculosis research. “These are high-risk studies—and high-reward if they succeed.”
“LIKE SUMMER CAMP”
Soon-to-graduate UMD student Priscila Terry was entertaining competing thoughts when she arrived in the sumptuous hotel lobby in February: The information science major was unhappy that her sick roommate had coughed freely around their apartment—including directly into a fan as she slept—the likely source of Terry’s flu. On the other hand, the payment involved— donor participants in the trial receive up to $1,900, while recipients can receive $2,500—would allow her to repay her parents for the fee they’d covered when she canceled a semester abroad to graduate early.
And she was wrestling with the complex ethics of medical trials, particularly those meant to induce illness: “I was always taught you should try avoiding coughing on people—it’s gross. It’s inconsiderate. But now I was supposed to make people sick.” Qualms like Terry’s were unnecessary, says Lehua Gray, who also participated in a February quarantine. The 36-year-old digital user experience designer from Baltimore County first signed up for so-called “challenge trials”—where scientists manually infect participants—to help develop a COVID-19 vaccine, but was not chosen. While Milton’s airborne transmission hypothesis lacks the electricity of the high-stakes fight against the pandemic, the deep scientific and policy questions involved quickly grabbed her.
One of the most surprising aspects of the experience to Gray was the bond that the recipients developed during their activities over their two weeks—“like summer camp.” Several have since stayed in touch, even meeting for drinks and lobbying with administrators to check back in as a group this winter.
“I could randomly catch the flu going to the grocery store, and it wouldn’t help anything,” Gray says. “If I get it as part of this study at the hotel, maybe it will help science understand something we don’t understand as well as we thought we did.” terp
FROM TITLES TO REVENUE TO ACADEMICS, MARYLAND SCORED BY JOINING THE BIG TEN CONFERENCE. HERE ARE 10 WAYS IT’S BEEN A B1G DECADE.
BY ANNIE KRAKOWER
WITH 2023’S MARCH MADNESS just a calendar page away, fans packed the Xfinity Center stands to soak in a matchup of top-10 titans. The No. 7 University of Maryland women’s basketball team was eyeing its fifth straight victory as it hosted No. 6 Iowa and star shooter Caitlin Clark, known nationwide for her deep threes.
But that night, it was the Terps’ Brinae Alexander who lit up the scoreboard, draining six three-pointers to lead UMD’s 96-68 blowout of the Hawkeyes, their biggest loss of the season.
The conference clash had the raucous and rowdy energy of classic Maryland rivalry games—a feeling that many fans worried would evaporate when UMD, a member of the Atlantic Coast Conference since 1953, joined a national wave of realignment and announced in 2012 it would move to the Big Ten starting July 1, 2014.
Ed Woods, a longtime fan and 1984-85 walk-on for Lefty Driesell’s basketball squad, couldn’t believe there’d be no more Duke, Carolina or Virginia. For alums and donors like Stan Goldstein ’68, who hadn’t missed an ACC Tournament from 1975 on, annual appointments would become mere memories.
But 10 years later, they and many other fans have come around to Maryland’s decision. (“I sleep a lot better in the Big Ten,” says Woods, and Goldstein calls it “one of the smartest, most brilliant moves ever.”) Indeed, it’s turned out pretty well for the Terps, who through a storm of shifting conference allegiances that aimed to ease growing and expected financial pressures—salaries, facilities, player compensation—have found safe harbor in the Big Ten.
the Xfinity Center’s trophy cases have filled up with hardware from dozens of titles won.
Their first year in the conference, the powerhouse men’s soccer, field hockey, women’s basketball and men’s and women’s lacrosse teams won titles. Those sports have combined for 27 regular-season, 18 Big Ten Tournament and six national championships since joining.
“Maryland came in and set the standard for what excellence is,” says Christy Winters-Scott ’90, a former ACC-champion women’s basketball player and now a color analyst for Big Ten Network. “They changed the style of play, the pace of play.”
The football team is fresh off three consecutive bowl wins but is still chasing championship glory in a conference loaded with national powerhouses. The men’s basketball team won the regular-season championship in the COVID-shortened 2020 season, but fans expect regular title runs. Across programs, UMD is still building new traditions and forming new rivalries, even 10 years later—few are getting riled up about a game against Rutgers or Nebraska just yet.
But as the Big Ten grows to encompass four new West Coast universities, the opportunities expand, too. Woods has season tickets, and Goldstein already has a trip to Oregon planned as fans embrace the conference—and the conference embraces the Terps.
“We’re sitting in a very, very good position as an institution to be in a conference where we’re on the inside, not on the outside looking in,” says Damon Evans, Barry P. Gossett Director of Athletics. “Stability and continuity are what help programs like ours continue to grow.”
UMD’s athletics revenue has received a substantial boost from the conference’s $7 billion media rights deal with FOX, CBS and NBC, which has also exposed viewers across the nation to Terp teams. New and renovated facilities touching each of Maryland’s 20 varsity sports have opened or are being built. And
“The Big Ten has benefited greatly from Maryland’s contributions since joining the league,” says Big Ten Chief Operating Officer Kerry Kenny, “and we’re excited to see how the Terps and the 17 other member institutions in the conference continue to provide successful opportunities for student-athletes in the classroom, on the playing surface and in the professional world post-graduation.”
Celebrate UMD’s 10 years in the Big Ten with the ultimate highlight reel of B1G moments, facts and figures.
NATIONAL TITLES
UMD stands third behind only Penn State and Ohio State since 2014-15:
• 2015, 2017 and 2019 – Women’s lacrosse
• 2017 and 2022 – Men’s lacrosse
• 2018 – Men’s soccer
3 CHAMPS x 2
5 STICKING TO SUCCESS
The field hockey team not only won conference titles its first three years in the league, but it also flexed its muscles in the NCAA Tournament, appearing in nine of the past 10 and reaching national title games in 2017 and 2018.
6 SAVING THE WAY TO HISTORIC HONOR
For 18 years, the Tewaaraton Award, given annually to the top male and female college lacrosse players, had never gone to a goalkeeper. That changed in 2019, when Maryland’s Megan Taylor recorded a .551 save percentage, the best of any Power Five goalie. She notched 10 saves in UMD’s 12-10 victory over Boston College, the Terps’ third national championship in five years.
7 PERFECT SEASON, PERFECT ENDING
After falling one win short of the 2021 title, the men’s lacrosse team defeated Cornell, 9-7, the following year to put a championship cherry on top of a perfect 18-0 season. The Terps became just the fourth undefeated team in the sport’s NCAA history. The last team to do it? The University of Virginia, which had bested UMD in the title game the year before.
REACHING THEIR GOAL
A 57th-minute penalty-kick goal by midfielder Amar Sejdic decided the 2018 men’s soccer national championship game, a 1-0 win over Akron that gave the Terps their first title since 2008. Through five NCAA Tournament matches, UMD didn’t allow a single goal.
season title—Maryland baseball’s first conference championship since 1971—wasn’t enough, the Terps’ programrecord 44 regular-season wins helped them earn the right to host one of 16 NCAA Regionals for the first time.
9 A STORMY NIGHT
In his first season at UMD in 2023, men’s basketball head coach Kevin Willard led the team to a 68-54 upset of No. 3 Purdue, sparking the sellout crowd to storm the Xfinity Center court. The win was Maryland’s first over an AP top five team since 2016, and it extended its program-record Big Ten home game— winning streak to 11.
49
CONFERENCE TITLES
Third behind only Michigan and Ohio State since 2014-15
10 BACK-TO-BACK-TO-BACK BOWLS
From Pinstripe to Duke’s Mayo to Music City, the football team won three consecutive bowl games over a three year stretch for the first time in program history, from 2021-23. The Terps are one of only four teams to win their last three bowls, joining Georgia, Minnesota and Texas Tech.
FISCAL STRENGTH
The Big Ten led all Power Five conferences in revenue generated in fiscal 2023 with $880M . The ACC’s totaled $707 million.
Maryland’s total athletic revenue increased from $88M in 2014-15 to $110M in 2023-24.
“That was one of the main reasons why we left, to provide us a little better financial footing,” says Evans. “It’s not only the financial footing today, but it’s the financial footing in the future.”
CONFERENCE CAROUSEL
As the Big Ten welcomes Oregon, UCLA, USC and Washington, nationwide realignment this season is also shaking up the rest of the Power Five conferences:
WINS BEYOND THE FIELD
Besides netting athletic achievements, Maryland’s conference move has also provided a boost through the Big Ten Academic Alliance, a strategic partnership among member institutions that encourages collaboration and co-investments. Highlights from the past decade include:
Across sports, Terps games are now available on Big Ten Network to approximately
50M HOUSEHOLDS
LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
More than 50 UMD faculty members have participated in the Big Ten Academic Leadership Program, a yearlong initiative to help participants sharpen their university-level administrative leadership skills.
RESEARCH
Big Ten institutions engage in $10 billion in funded research each year; the alliance allows members to partner and leverage resources and facilities. During the pandemic, for example, UMD joined other researchers in the conference in creating a registry to analyze COVID-cardiac associations among athletes.
COURSESHARE
“The amount of texts I received after (our first Big Ten Network game), I would liken it to when we were in the postseason in the NCAA Tournament nationally,” says longtime women’s basketball head coach Brenda Frese. “That’s when I knew we were in so many households.”
This program allows students to take language courses offered at other Big Ten schools from a distance. For example, the UMD class “Korean Food Cultures: Past and Present” in Fall 2022 also included students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Illinois.
LIBRARIES
Under the alliance’s UBorrow program, students, faculty and staff across the Big Ten have rapid access to member institutions’ holdings, which total over 90 million books.
Trailblazing journalist Connie Chung ’69 battled misogyny and racism to reach the pinnacle of TV news. In a new self-titled memoir, she shares what it took to get there.
BY KAREN SHIH ’09
PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEPHANIE S. CORDLE
HE FIRST THING
Connie Chung ’69 will tell you these days is that she’s 3 inches shorter than she used to be.
It’s a little ironic, considering she’s never shrunk from anything. Not when she was a 25-year-old reporter covering Watergate, coming face to face with President Richard Nixon as he tried to dodge the media while evidence mounted against him. Not when people told her she “slanted the news” or produced “yellow journalism” because she was Asian American. Not when a sports reporter asked her on air, “When is my laundry going to be done, Connie?”
“My M.O. was to throw it at them before they threw it at me,” she says. “I would tell a racist joke because I could tell it was coming, or tell a sexist joke to a man to throw them off. I don’t recommend it to anyone, but I had to find a way to navigate the overwhelmingly white male settings.”
The groundbreaking journalist, who became the first Asian American and second woman to anchor an evening news program, details it all in a new memoir out Sept. 17, titled “Connie.” Nearly a decade in the making, the book reveals for the first time how Chung experienced the highs and lows of her long career that spanned every major news network.
“It’s a delicate balance,” she says of the writing process, which forced her to exhume and reexamine some painful memories. “I felt like, ‘I’m not allowed to tell how I feel.’ I didn’t want anyone seeing me as some kind of crybaby.”
Largely out of the spotlight for the last two decades, she evokes my Asian aunties as she walks into her publisher’s office in New York City, looking up from her visor to give me a warm hug. Chatty and full of self-deprecating quips, she seems far removed from her days on camera, interviewing world leaders and covering national tragedies. She squeals with delight when a photo of my young girls pops on my phone’s lock screen.
But the strength and determination that got her to the top of the cutthroat television news business, decades before the #MeToo reckoning and Stop Asian Hate campaign, are still inside her—and that’s the story she’s now ready to share.
“It’s easy to tell the truth,” she says, about those who stood in her way. “The question is, Do I throw them under the bus? Or gently place them in the line of traffic?”
FROM THE ’VOUS TO TV IN ANOTHER LIFE , Chung could have been an accountant or a scientist, toiling in obscurity. Her parents had barely escaped as China fell under Communist rule in the 1940s, bringing her four older sisters to America by boat and settling in Washington, D.C., where Chung was born. But her discovery of boys and beer while at the University of Maryland put those more traditional paths to rest. Busy drinking at popular bar the ’Vous and dancing to the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” at fraternity keg parties, she saw her grades plummet in business, then biology, and she had to find a major for the third time.
Then she had a chance encounter with U.S. Rep. Seymour Halpern of New York while taking a friend on a tour of the Capitol. He offered a card; she dialed the number for a summer job and wound up writing press releases and briefing papers.
Chung, then a young reporter for CBS, stands among a crowd of mostly white men after a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Watergate.
Chung was elected “Freshman Queen” by her UMD peers, as shown in the 1966 “Terrapin” yearbook.
“I saw members of Congress like rock stars,” she says. “It was like seeing Springsteen or Bon Jovi.”
Chung switched to journalism and stayed an extra year to finish her degree, writing for The Diamondback and reporting for WMUC radio. She credits one of her UMD professors for telling her to start searching early for a job in TV
She pitched herself at local stations in January, finally landing a gig as a part-time “copy boy” at WTTG - TV Channel 5. But after she graduated, the only job that management offered her was newsroom secretary. She took it, confident that all she needed was a foot in the door.
“AS STRONG AND TOUGH AS THE NEXT GUY”
IN 2020 , a photo of young Chung (left) went viral on social media. She’s facing the camera, looking tired and exasperated among a sea of white men after a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Watergate.
Journalist Marian Wang’s Twitter post declared it a “mood,” and commenters said they couldn’t imagine “the amount of B.S. she put up with” and that “all women know what she’s thinking.”
What Chung felt was this: She was thrilled to be covering the scandal as a young reporter—but she always felt the pressure to “give 200%” and prove herself in a male-dominated industry.
The networks had hired no women until they were forced to do so after the 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawed sex discrimination, says Merrill College Professor Emerita Maurine Beasley, a journalism historian. “They were afraid of getting sued.”
I HAD SWAGGER AND FALSE BRAVADO— AND A POTTY MOUTH.
But the men weren’t thrilled to have women in their midst. To navigate the countless “he either wants to f*ck you or f*ck you over” situations— like when presidential candidate Sen. George McGovern tried to kiss her in a deserted hallway—Chung writes that she relied on her quick wit.
“I had to be as strong and tough as the next guy,” she says. “I lowered my voice. I had swagger and false bravado—and a potty mouth.”
When she was thrust into the impeachment of President Richard Nixon, she chased key figures as they left for work before dawn, accosted others for a soundbite on their way to church and even cold-called those on his infamous “enemies list” at 3 a.m.
Her relentlessness caught the attention of her role model, iconic CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite, who sent her positive notes through interoffice mail. He was “just plain nice,” she writes, and his encouragement pushed her to keep going.
Hours before Nixon’s resignation, Chung got exclusive insight into the outgoing president’s mood from his top aide, which led to her first on-air appearance with future co-anchor Dan Rather. He was magnanimous and friendly then, but their relationship soured as she climbed the ranks.
Chung’s memoir, “Connie,” comes out Sept. 17.
RISE AND FALL AT CBS
AFTER BARBARA WALTERS became the first woman to co-anchor an evening news program in 1976, it took nearly two decades for another to follow in her footsteps. But while graphics had gotten snazzier and shoulder pads had gotten bigger, male egos and attitudes hadn’t changed. What started as Chung’s
proudest achievement also became her most painful experience.
She decamped to L.A. post-Watergate, anchoring for seven years before moving to NBC headquarters in New York. There, she hosted an earlymorning show and contributed to the evening news. She resented being assigned salacious stories on weight loss, sex and celebrities by the NBC “male brigade,” so she returned to CBS in 1989.
As the host of “Face to Face with Connie Chung,” a weekly newsmagazine, she secured major interviews, including with the ship captain involved in the Exxon Valdez spill, and reported on the dangers of silicone breast implants, which led the Food and Drug Administration to ban their use until more stringent regulations were implemented.
Then, as ratings dropped for the Rather-led “CBS Evening News,” she was hired as co-anchor in May 1993, becoming the first Asian American to hold the coveted spot. He was condescending from the start, she writes, telling her during their initial sit-down she would have to “start reading the newspaper.” She still found success, such as interviewing Chinese Premier Li Peng on the fifth anniversary of the government crackdown in Tiananmen Square. But when she anchored the Oklahoma City bombing coverage while Rather was on vacation, he seethed, telling The New York Times “it was like trying to swallow barbed-wirewrapped ball bearings.”
By April 1995, she writes, Rather delivered an ultimatum to CBS President Peter Lund, and Chung was out. (Rather denied it, telling The Washington Post that “Nobody has heard a critical comment from me about
Connie” and that her removal “came as a surprise to us.”)
She got the call from her agent just minutes before going on air, but she composed herself and delivered the news.
“I was devastated,” she says. “But they knew me better than I knew me. They figured I wasn’t going to be a maniac, even though I was on live TV, and they were right.”
abruptly ended her 1994 interview with Chung over questions on what she knew about the attack a month earlier on fellow ice
BOTTOM : Chung with co-anchor Dan Rather during her two-year run on the “CBS Evening News,” where she became the first Asian American and second woman to hold a nightly news anchor spot.
INSPIRING A NEW GENERATION
GRAPPLING WITH HER legacy has always been a challenge for Chung, who rebuilt her career by returning to newsmagazines after leaving CBS.
“I’m perpetually wondering if I should have taken the other road,” says Chung. “I’m a big ‘wouldacoulda-shoulda’ person—it drives my husband crazy.”
That husband is Maury Povich of “You are the father!” fame on his eponymous three-decade talk show known for its DNA test reveals. But to her, he was her steadfast support as she navigated the treacherous waters of television news. “I have always, for the last 40-odd years, thought of myself as ‘Mr. Chung,’” he says—a nod to how their doorman addressed him when they first got married.
The one thing she’s sure of is adopting their son, Matthew, when she was almost 50 years old. She struggled for years with failed IVF procedures and miscarriages, and writes that she was humiliated when CBS pressured her into putting out a statement when “Face to Face” was canceled, saying she was leaving to focus on conceiving a child.
“I never wanted my private life to be public,” she says. Serendipitously,
TOP: Tonya Harding
skater Nancy Kerrigan.
she got the call that Matthew would be born right when she lost the co-anchor job, giving her time to devote to being a full-time mom. “Matthew is meant to be my son and Maury’s son. This is the way it was supposed to be for me. It’s so fulfilling and heartwarming and indescribably wonderful.”
Deciding she was too old to have another, she didn’t adopt a little Chinese girl as originally planned. But in 2019, she was contacted by fellow journalist Connie Wang, who had discovered dozens of Asian Americans like her born throughout the 1970s to 1990s and named Connie in homage to Chung.
“I always knew she had that kind of impact, but she never believed it,” says Povich. “It took that moment for her to realize. All she cared about was doing the job. She had blinders to how much the other aspects of her life were so meaningful.”
My immigrant parents were among many who took comfort and pride in Chung’s achievements when they arrived from Taiwan (though they didn’t go so far as to name me Connie). They looked to her as a hopeful possibility as their daughter eschewed their plans for law or med school to instead scribble in a notebook and tell stories for a living.
Subverting expectations is a theme Chung heard over and over when she finally met 10 of her namesakes at the photo shoot for the “Generation Connie” piece in The New York Times. As photographer Connie Chung Aramaki told her, being named “Connie” means “your parents want you to work hard and be brave and take chances.”
“I’m finally able to get my arms around this phenomenon … my living legacy,” Chung says.
Her impact is broad and undeniable. Just turn on the TV to watch Norah O’Donnell solo-anchoring CBS ’s weeknight newscast or John Yang hosting “PBS News Weekend.” During Chung’s book tour this fall, she’ll have the chance to encourage even more women and people of color to blaze their own paths.
“I’m hoping that for those who loved her and loved her work, the memoir will confirm that,” Povich says. “And for those who may never have seen her work at all, the younger generation, this will be an inspiration.” TERP
Chung will visit UMD for her book tour Oct. 8, 6-8 p.m., at the Samuel Riggs IV Alumni Center. Registration is required: go.umd.edu/conniechat
CLOSE-UP ON COUPLE’S SUPPORT
Chung is grateful for the lessons she learned at UMD’s journalism school—and UMD is grateful for her and husband Maury Povich’s longtime support. She was a co-chair of UMD’s “Great Expectations” fundraising campaign and has funded a scholarship in her name; he and his siblings helped establish the Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism, named for his father and late Washington Post columnist, as well as the George Solomon Endowed Chair in Sports Journalism.
CHUNG’S MOST FAMOUS INTERVIEWS
MAGIC JOHNSON (1991)
It was a shock when the NBA superstar announced he was retiring from the Los Angeles Lakers because he tested positive for HIV at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Chung, who had become friendly with him during her time as an anchor in L.A., camped out at his agent’s office until he acquiesced, and she secured the first interview after his diagnosis. “Magic was honest and open, answering every uncomfortable question, (including) how he’d told his wife, Cookie, who was pregnant with their first child,” Chung writes.
KATHLEEN GINGRICH (1995)
The sit-down with then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s mother, in which she fauxwhispered to Chung her son’s thoughts on then-first lady Hillary Clinton—“She’s a bitch”—just about “incinerated my career,” Chung writes. The blowback was immediate, with him accusing Chung of tricking a “nice simple woman” and critics calling her a “predator.”
GARY CONDIT (2001)
When D.C. intern Chandra Levy went missing, all eyes quickly went to U.S. Rep. Gary Condit of California, who was rumored to have had an affair with her. Chung got the exclusive, though the congressman remained tight-lipped about their relationship and denied involvement with her disappearance. (Her remains were found a year later; the murder remains unsolved.) Disney President Bob Iger, owner of ABC, emailed Chung to say she was “tough, focused, relentless, tenacious, and even charming!” It became the highest-rated news program on any network that year, with 24 million viewers.
Letter from the Senior Executive Director
I AM DEEPLY HONORED to write to you as the new senior executive director of the University of Maryland Alumni Association. This role is truly a dream come true for me. Maryland has given me so much: my education, my husband, Chad Roberts ’01, cherished friendships and a rewarding career for the past 15 years. I am overjoyed to give back to my alma mater in this new way.
My passion for our association and my fellow alums knows no bounds. It is the people I get to work with every day and the remarkable community of alums I’ve had the pleasure of meeting who inspire me daily.
As your new leader, I promise to reinforce the mission of the Alumni Association to be a partner and a resource for Terps everywhere to pursue excellence and impact in every stage of life. We are committed to:
• Helping you propel your career through enhanced professional programming and valuable corporate connections
• Empowering you to lead a life of meaning and impact with ongoing opportunities for lifelong learning
• Increasing the value of your membership with expanded benefits and more opportunities to make an impact
• Elevating the value of your degree by enhancing UMD’s reputation and rankings
I take great pride in the achievements of our Alumni Association and the incredible contributions of Maryland alums across the globe. My goal is to amplify the impact of Terps everywhere and to encourage each alum to contribute to our alma mater in at least one way each year. You can help strengthen our university by joining the association as a member or buying exclusive merchandise from our online store, attending an event or nominating a fellow alum for an award, or volunteering with a Terp network or contributing to our community service projects.
We have a shared responsibility to contribute to the university’s success and its legacy. Terps together stay fearless forever.
I look forward to connecting with each and every one of you.
Jessica K. Roberts ’02
Senior Executive Director University of Maryland Alumni Association
HOMECOMING WEEK 2024
OCT. 13-19
COME HOME TO MARYLAND TO CHEER ON THE RED,
TERP CARNIVAL
OCT. 18, 5-8 P.M.
Kick off Homecoming weekend with this familyfriendly event on McKeldin Mall. Enjoy food, games and a spectacular fireworks finale.
LIFE WALL UNVEILING
OCT. 19, 3.5 HOURS PRIOR TO KICKOFF
See the names of new Alumni Association lifetime members etched into the Frann G. & Eric S. Francis Lifetime Member Wall next to SECU Stadium.
HOMECOMING TAILGATE
OCT. 19, 2.5 HOURS PRIOR TO KICKOFF
The annual beer garden and tailgate in Moxley Gardens will feature drinks from Terp-owned breweries, delicious food, a live DJ and more. Members will receive one free food and drink voucher at the tailgate.
EXCLUSIVE T-SHIRT
STARTING OCT. 1
For the first time, the UMD Homecoming T-shirt will be available to all Terps! Get yours at homecoming.umd.edu
Tailgates, Touchdowns and Togetherness
Homecoming Fans Reveal What Gets Them Hyped
HOMECOMING AT UMD isn’t just an annual tradition. It’s a rite of passage for thousands of returning Terps. We caught up with a few who are eager to celebrate and embrace the Terrapin nostalgia this fall with fellow alums.
PREET MANDAVIA ’14
NORTH BETHESDA, MD.
What brings Preet Mandavia ’14 to Homecoming? Without question, tailgating. And when the festivities keep going past kickoff, he’s content to catch the game via a grandpa’s iPad (although he admits inside SECU Stadium is the ideal location). Preet loves nothing more than cooking and partying with the people he made lifelong connections with in college, especially if those friends are traveling from far away. It’s his perfect recipe for a weekend filled with Terp pride.
BROOKE PARKER ’14 & DAN ZAWACKI ’13
HANOVER, MD.
Thanks to a floormate’s family tailgate over a decade ago, Homecoming is where Brooke Parker ’14 learned to pick a crab like a true Marylander. These days, she and her husband Dan Zawacki ’13 love strolling around campus at Homecoming, seeing what has changed and catching up with friends as they hop from tailgate to tailgate. But ultimately, they can’t wait to visit the spot on campus where they shared so many special memories—the
Memorial Chapel gardens—and make new ones with their future Terp.
LADE GBOLADE ’21
HIGHLAND PARK, N.J.
Sitting in the stadium stands and cheering on the football team is the No. 1 Homecoming tradition for Lade Gbolade ’21. This year, she is looking forward to the SEE Comedy Show, as well as reconnecting with the amazing friends she met through the Student Alumni Leadership Council. But her favorite memory? It was attending last year’s Division of Student Affairs Homecoming Leadership Celebration and commemorating the mark she and other student leaders have left on campus.
ANDREW STRING ’21
NEW YORK, N.Y.
For Andrew String ’21, Homecoming is the perfect opportunity to see all the changes at Maryland, whether new buildings, academic programs or student groups. Plus, it’s always fun to show his family and friends what his campus life was all about. He isn’t able to return to College Park this year, but plans to catch the game with fellow members of the New York Terps Alumni Network at Abbey Tavern, its official game-watch bar. He’s looking forward to connecting with recent grads and introducing
What Happens in Vegas (Is Thanks to a Terp)
Alum Brings Big Concerts to Sin City
Staging a cole field house concert during basketball season under coach Gary Williams’ reign was like trying to make a half-court shot.
But for musical greats Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, Sid Greenfeig ’99 (above right) hit nothing but net.
He and fellow Student Entertainment Events (SEE) members raced across the arena the moment the final buzzer sounded one November evening in 1998, removing courtside chairs and loading in equipment throughout the night for the next day’s sold-out show.
“You’re 21 years old and you’re setting up for two legends,” says Greenfeig. “It was really cool.”
Today, he’s booking Grammy award-winner Adele for a monthslong stop at Caesars Palace and K-pop superstars BTS at Allegiant Stadium as Live Nation’s senior vice president of concerts in Las Vegas. Business is booming as consumers shift their spending to experiences and more artists turn to live shows—particularly convenient residencies—to make money in the streaming age.
“My favorite moment of every show is before the artist takes the stage, when it’s completely dark and the crowd just goes ballistic—just knowing that I had a part in this moment for everyone in the room,” he says.
As a finance major at UMD, Greenfeig had never considered an entertainment career until friend Jared Paul ’99 asked him to help with a SEE show. After getting his first taste of backstage access, Greenfeig joined the club to book major acts, starting with the Wu-Tang Clan.
“It was one of the scariest nights at the beginning,” he says, due to a miscommunication about payment, which he and Paul quickly sorted out. Once the hip-hop group got onstage, it got the crowd so pumped up—Method Man even hung from the rafters—that students damaged the newly renovated Ritchie Coliseum and got SEE banned from the facility for a few years.
Undeterred, he and Paul teamed up again shortly after graduation, this time overseeing entertainment at the new MCI Arena in Washington, D.C.
“People would see two kids, and they’d try to take advantage and call us every name there was,” he says. “But that’s where we cut our teeth.”
His work for Madison Square Garden, MGM Resorts and now Live Nation has taken him from south Florida to Los Angeles to Philadelphia. Las Vegas’ unusual venues, including the recently opened Sphere with its unique audio and visual capabilities, make it an
essential stop for performers, he says. He oversees marketing, ticket sales and logistics, juggling multiple shows at once.
Not having a traditional 9-to-5 has been tough at times as he and wife Amy Herr Greenfeig ’00 grew their family. Overseeing concerts can keep him out until 2 a.m., and a call about a last-minute snafu could pull him from the sidelines of a soccer game. But these days, his three kids (especially the 15-year-old) have caught on that Dad has the connections to get them into the hottest shows, such as the iHeartRadio Music Festival.
He credits UMD with steering him on the path to success, Greenfeig says, especially Stamp Student Union Director Marsha Guenzler-Stevens, who put her trust in “a couple of idiots” when he and Paul, now an entertainment manager, led SEE.
“She gave me a huge opportunity,” Greenfeig says. “Now, I’ve created a career and lifestyle, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”—ks
Greenfeig Raves About His All-time Faves
• PERRY FARRELL, WAR and ADAM LEVINE in the Viper Room (~2015). “It’s a really small room, maybe 600 people,” he says. Seeing artists from such different genres collaborating up close blew his mind. “I remember Perry Farrell singing ‘Get Up, Stand Up’ with War, and I’m like, ‘What’s going on here?’”
• JAY-Z and EMINEM at Yankee Stadium (2010). “I grew up a Yankees fan, so when I saw they were playing there, I was like, ‘I’ve got to go.’ I … realized as I was trying to find my seats that I’m on the field, getting closer and closer. I’d already been in the business for 15 years, but it was still amazing.”
• THE KILLERS at T-Mobile Arena (2022). “I was brought on when the building was just starting to be constructed, so we wanted to do a big opening show. I had this vision: We should do something for the locals, brand it, so we got the Killers, who are from Las Vegas. It was a whole journey, opening the venue, booking something, creating something out of that.”
CLASS NOTES
“Heavyweight: A Family Story of the Holocaust, Empire and Memory,” a graphic memoir by SOLOMON J. BRAGER ’10 , was published by William Morrow. They hold a doctorate from Rutgers University, New Brunswick; teach history, media and gender studies at Rutgers; and are director of community engagement for Jewish Currents magazine.
MICHELLE (“SUN”) CHOE ’91 is the new global brand president of the apparel brand Vans. She previously led design and merchandising for lululemon, Marc Jacobs, West Elm, Madewell, Urban Outfitters, Levi’s and the Gap.
SCOTT FOSTER ’91 was among the referees at the NBA Finals between the Boston Celtics and Dallas Mavericks. Over his 30-year career in the NBA, he’s officiated more playoff games than anyone, including 25 in the finals.
JOAN VASSOS ’85 was named the first “Golden Bachelorette” in the latest iteration of the dating reality TV series, slated to air on ABC this fall. She works in alumni relations at a private school in Montgomery County, Md., and was a contestant on “The Golden Bachelor,” but left in Week 3 due to a family emergency.
RICK EBERST PH.D. ’77 was named chief docent for August’s Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, the Super Bowl of classic car shows, conducting tours and ensuring that the team is knowledgeable about all 225-plus entries at the event. The professor emeritus from the California State University has restored 45 cars himself and still drives his Terp-red 1966 Corvette Coupe.
Submit your class notes and read many more at terp.umd.edu.
Above: Wu-Tang Clan performs at Ritchie Coliseum in Oct. 1997; right: Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell united for a sold-out show at Cole Field House in Nov. 1998; both were thanks to Greenfeig’s work with SEE.
Behind Baltimore’s Closed Doors
Alumna Investigates the Small Histories in Charm City’s Houses
n the corner of East Fort
OAvenue and Webster Street in South Baltimore, Katie Labor
Ph.D. ’23 is making a new friend: the owner of a rowhouse whose exterior brick wall boasts two mid-century murals advertising Fort Avenue Pharmacy, which occupied the space for nearly 50 years.
The owner, Michael Perry, who was heading to his car as Labor admired the mural, takes her inside and on a digital tour of the house’s renovations, flipping through his iPad to show how the basement used to hold swivel chairs and blow dryers for the beauty salon that replaced the pharmacy.
Labor beams with excitement.
Her quest to unearth Baltimore’s hyperlocal history isn’t always this easy. As the sleuth behind the X/Twitter account @BehindBmoreLots, Labor typically digs through newspaper archives to find the human dramas behind Charm City’s historic homes and businesses.
“I’ve always liked finding out about the places I lived in, and Baltimore has been fantastic, because everything’s old,” she says.
Labor’s project started one morning two years ago, when she was taking the bus to her job at Johns Hopkins University, where she’s now a pre-professional academic adviser. As she gawped at the more than 100-year-old rowhouses along her route, she began entering their addresses into newspapers.com, where she had an account
for genealogy research.
“One of the houses had two articles come up,” Labor says. “One was about a little girl who’d stuck a pencil in her ear, and then two years later, there was another article about the same little girl getting hit by a streetcar. She was extremely accident-prone. I was so charmed by that.” (The girl sustained only minor injuries in both incidents.)
A bit of benign busybody-ness also stoked Labor’s dissertation in UMD’s history department. She pored over American travel narratives from the 18th century to investigate how people’s sense of personal privacy
was changing. “It’s a time of transition when most people go from living in one or two rooms to living in true houses,” she says. “People are starting to get more used to the idea of basic personal privacy.”
Thankfully, a growing sense of privacy didn’t keep people from spilling details of their personal lives to newspapers, which for much of the 20th century functioned in part as social registers for cities and towns. In The Baltimore Sun or the Baltimore Afro-American, residents made sure all their neighbors knew about the engagement parties they threw for their daughters or the
births of babies.
Most houses held sad stories, too. In one on Light Street, a mother pleaded for help finding her son, a vaudeville and circus performer who’d been missing for four years. In another, a teenager named Alexander was arrested in 1913 for stealing materials to bring gas heat to his house. Several months later, The Sun reported that his father had “started for parts unknown, leaving his wife and children”— exacerbating the family’s apparent financial struggles. Just a few years later, Alexander died after being wounded in battle in France during World War I.
“I think about the things about the past that we’ll never be able to recapture,” Labor says, “and looking at old newspapers, you get those glimpses that don’t get passed down.”—sl
Back to the Buzzer
After 9 Wins on “Jeopardy!,” History Grad to Return for Tournament of Champions
AN ALUM WITH a penchant for ’70s-inspired attire and a quick wit—and buzzer finger— will get a chance to add to the $215,390 he’s already won on “Jeopardy!” when he competes in its Tournament of Champions in early 2025.
Isaac Hirsch ’14 became the TV show’s second-biggest winner of 2024, taking down the competition for nearly two weeks in July with his pop culture know-how, wordplay skills, and literature and history expertise—thanks to his UMD degree.
“When you’re up there, your brain’s in low-power mode. You’re using like 20% of it, so you’re trying to make mental connections with the scraps of what’s left,” he says. Multiply that by playing five games, back-to-back, with just 20-minute breaks to change clothes, and his nine-game winning streak looks all the more remarkable.
He credits his decade of experience as a part-time comedian, starting from when he was president of UMD’s standup club, and his previous appearances on trivia shows “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” and “The Chase” with helping him stay relaxed on stage.
Hirsch grew up in a multigenerational “Jeopardy!” family—his dad appeared on the show in the early 1980s—and his parents were librarians who stocked the house with reference books. He got his first taste of TV trivia competition when he joined the “It’s Academic” team in high school, then competed for UMD’s Quiz Bowl team, though he spent most of his time on the “B” squad.
“Maryland has a very good team,” says Hirsch, a customer support team lead for a software company from Burbank, Calif. “‘But Quiz Bowl tests depth of knowledge, and I don’t know a lot about anything. ‘Jeopardy!’ tests breadth of knowledge, and I know a little about everything.”
Since filming wrapped in May, he’s been brushing up on weaker topics, like geography and science, to get ready to face off against fellow contestants who won five games or more.
“I’m going in with a lot to prove,” says Hirsch. “People will look at me like one of the favorites, but there’s a lot of luck involved. So I’m preparing as if it’s tomorrow!”—KS
PHOTOS COURTESY OF JEOPARDY PRODUCTIONS
KATIE LABOR PH.D. ’23
ISAAC HIRSCH ’14
AI COULD TRANSFORM OUR WORLD MORE PROFOUNDLY THAN ANY TECH IN HISTORY. Even as we champion its potential to improve cancer therapies, pinpoint unexploded shells in war zones, or develop safe and helpful robots for everyday life, we must also grapple with deepfakes, disinformation and built-in bias. We launched the Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute at Maryland to counter these threats and tap into the potential of responsible and ethical AI technology to advance the public good across our society.
It’s all happening now at the University of Maryland. Here, we lead Fearlessly Forward.
Spring in Their Step
SPIRITED STUDENTS leapfrog over one another during the 1991 Homecoming step show, a former annual tradition for the University of Maryland’s Black Greek-letter organizations. Recognize any of these talented Terps? Or were you part of the Cole Field House crowd mesmerized by their moves? Share your memories with us at terpfeedback@umd.edu, and check back in the next issue to find the responses and another fun snapshot of UMD history.—AK
Many Terps wrote in about their gripping experiences in the 1986 hunger-fighting fundraising stunt Hands Across America, from landing on the front page of The Baltimore Sun to being mistaken for standing in a Grateful Dead ticket line. But we heard from only one alum in the campus photo shown in the Spring 2024 issue: Michael Heitt ’89 recognized his freshman year roommate, Bryan
Gordon ’90 (about 20 people from the left in a dark shirt), and himself (the shorter man to his left). “I remember the day fondly because it was when I first spoke to my wife, Sandy Hawkins, who was in town for a campus tour,” Heitt wrote. Another part of the day he can’t forget? The event’s theme song performed by Toto, which he said Gordon played nonstop on the sixth floor of Cumberland Hall.
FROM THE LAST ISSUE…
TRACK RECORD
Newly laid tracks for the state’s light-rail Purple Line curve past Reckord Armory and up to Campus Drive. The university worked with the Maryland Department of Transportation to accelerate construction, with major projects in the campus core wrapping up in the fall. When completed in 2027, the project will span 16 miles from New Carrollton in Prince George’s County to Bethesda in Montgomery County. Five of the 21 stations will be on or near UMD, and students, faculty and staff can ride for free between them. The transit system is expected to reduce the university’s greenhouse emissions while expanding Terps’ access to the region with connections to Metro, MARC and Amtrak.
PHOTO BY JOHN T. CONSOLI
TURN MILESTONES INTO BRICKS
A personalized, engraved brick outside the Samuel Riggs IV Alumni Center can honor your time at the university, celebrate a special milestone or pay tribute to a loved one. Purchase one today to leave a lasting legacy on the campus you cherish.
