Terp Winter 2018

B L A C K H I STO RY TO U R : A WA L K TO R E M E M B E R 08

H OW 3 - D P R I N T I N G W I L L OV E R H AU L H E A LT H C A R E 26

T H E A R C H I T EC T W H O F R A M E D M L K' S L A ST V I S I O N 32

W I N T E R 2 0 1 8 / CO N N EC T I N G T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F M A RY L A N D CO M M U N I T Y

ON THE MALL

ALUMNI

CAMPUS LIFE

06 07 08 08 10 12 13

Housing’s Bright Future More Life for Bioengineering A Walk to Remember Hunger Gains Stride for Stride A Harmonious Chord Putting Health at the Center

EXPLORATIONS

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Good News for Old News No One Left Behind Faculty Q&A Unlikely Library Loans Out of Their Shells Regional Flavor Wake-up Call The Big Question

CONTENTS 2

T E R P. U M D . E D U

40 42 42 44 44 46

Alumni Association The Cheri Bustos File Fine-Tuned for Success Class Notes Bringing Rome Home From the Archives

FEATURES

ONLINE

A Perfect Fit for Football Meet the Terps’ football equipment manager, who maintains an inventory including 750 helmets, 1,200 game jerseys and 3,000 pairs of socks.

Burning Question A professor of fire protection engineering helps lead the factfinding mission following a deadly high-rise fire in London.

The Bee’s Knees

22

Building Together The A. James & Alice B. Clark Foundation makes a historic $219.5 million investment in umd, increasing college affordability and access, recruiting new faculty and creating new facilities.

BY TERP STAFF

32 City of Hope

Fifty years ago this spring, a professor at umd’s new architecture school

helped bring Martin Luther King Jr.’s

last protest vision to life. Resurrection

City in D.C. and its politics were messy,

as is its legacy today.

26

The Shape of Things to Come 3-D printing is on the cusp of overhauling medical care, and umd researchers are already proving its value in rehearsing surgeries, testing drugs and creating prosthetics quickly and cheaply.

BY CHRIS CARROLL

BY LIAM FARRELL

Sammy Ramsey Ph.D. ’18 won the global Three-Minute Thesis contest by quickly explaining in plain English his research on a honeybeekilling parasite.

Find new stories every week at TERP.UMD.EDU.

TRANSFORM THE STUDENT EXPERIENCE

Fearless Ideas Every issue of Terp features examples of how umd transforms the student experience. This time, we further highlight those stories with a “ .”

We’ll do the same in future issues on our efforts to turn imagination into innovation, discover new knowledge and inspire Maryland pride.

WINTER 2018

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FROM THE EDITOR

terp turns 15 this year, the same age as my older son. Both have their charms— I’m particularly fond of my boy’s “Henry strut” and his tradition of Fancy Shirt Friday—but could use a little freshening up.

In a process much like standing under unflattering fluorescent lights, the staff here mercilessly scrutinized Terp’s layouts, stories and art and debated what works, what doesn’t and what’s simply outdated.

We scoured other university magazines and mainstream pubs for inspiration. We asked readers to weigh in, and we thank all of you who filled out our survey. We heard that you want more bite-size pieces, more research articles, more alumni stories, more about history and “regular students.”

You’ll see the results of our efforts here, starting with added pages. The look is cleaner and airier, and the departments are more organized and easier to identify. We’re putting greater emphasis on campus life and rolling out “From the Archives,” to replace “Ask Anne,” following the retirement of University Archivist Anne Turkos. In another new segment, we ask faculty members from around campus a “Big Question,” to see how experts across disciplines approach a timely issue.

Our website, terp.umd.edu, will relaunch soon with an even bigger overhaul.

Meanwhile, we’re still publishing new stories there every week.

What else hasn’t changed? Terp’s mission, to connect the University of Maryland community. Whether you’re an alum, student, parent, faculty or staff member, or other supporter, we hope to reflect the Maryland experience and our identity of Terps as bold, curious, proud, smart and fun.

You’ll find that inside this issue, where we celebrate the historic $219.5 million investment from the A. James & Alice B. Clark Foundation, explore a professor’s role in an overlooked chapter of civil rights history and introduce you to music students living and working in a local retirement community.

Please let us know what you think! Write anytime at terpfeedback@umd.edu, or give me a call at 301.405.4612.

If you’re anything like my teenager, you won’t even hesitate.

Lauren Brown University Editor

Publisher JACKIE LEWIS Vice President, University Relations

Advisers JOEL R. SELIGMAN Associate Vice President, Strategic Communications AMY EICHHORST Executive Director, Alumni Association MARGARET HALL Executive Director, Creative Strategies

Magazine Staff LAUREN BROWN University Editor JOHN T. CONSOLI ’86 Creative Director GABRIELA HERNANDEZ Art Director CHRIS CARROLL LIAM FARRELL SALA LEVIN ’10 Writers JASON A. KEISLING HAILEY HWA SHIN RYUMI SUNG Designers LINDSAY COLLINS ’20 DANIEL OYEFUSI ’19 Interns GAIL RUPERT M.L.S. ’10 Photography Assistant JAGU CORNISH Production Manager

EMAIL terpfeedback@umd.edu ONLINE terp.umd.edu VIDEO terpvision.umd.edu NEWS umdrightnow.umd.edu FACEBOOK.COM/ UnivofMaryland TWITTER.COM/UofMaryland VIMEO.COM/umd YOUTUBE.COM/UMD2101

The University of Maryland, College Park is an equal opportunity institution with respect to both education and employment. University policies, programs and activities are in conformance with pertinent federal and state laws and regulations on non-discrimination regarding race, color, religion, age, national origin, political affiliation, gender, sexual orientation or disability.

COVER “Building Together” by Hailey Hwa Shin, Jason Keisling, Brian G. Payne and Terrapin Works

A class note in the Fall 2017 issue erroneously identified Dr. Jerome M. Adams, U.S. surgeon general, as a Terp.

He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

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INTERPLAY

WRITE TO US We love to hear from readers. Send your feedback, insights, compliments—and, yes, complaints—to terpfeedback.umd.edu or Terp magazine Office of Strategic Communications 7736 Baltimore Ave. College Park, MD 20742

WARM THANKS Congratulations to Dr. Hillel Goldstein ’90, Alexis Olmsted ’92 and Jeremy Rachlin ’02, who were selected at random from the list of Terp survey respondents to receive a new Terps hoodie.

umd researchers are working with residents of the Deal Island peninsula in Maryland to preserve their coastal communities

Final Anne-swers

In your latest Terp magazine, the retiring archivist talks about the Foucault pendulum that was in the Math Building. She mentioned that it was there from the 1970s to the early ’80s. When I was a student at the math and physics departments (1958–63), the pendulum was very much in evidence there and was a meeting place or a place to rest from studies and watch the pendulum. So it was there way before the 1970s and ’80s.

The Tides That Bind

Wonderful article! Keep going with this very important work! Dr. Paolisso and his staff do a great job interacting with local people to accomplish this research and its results. It is a privilege to have their valuable knowledge and effort serving our community!

LIZ BRIGHTMAN, SALISBURY, MD., VIA TERP ONLINE

Thank You

So awesome! Thank you, Lefty… can’t wait to relive those games!

Sorry I am too late for your reader survey. But I just had to write and tell you how terrific the Fall 2017 issue was. Great scope of topics, nice writing and great layouts with visually pleasing and informative balance of illustrations and photos.

I found the articles about the retiring archivist, the new basketball archives (I was a student on campus during the Lefty Dreisell era), the Brooklyn garden, climate change’s impact on the Chesapeake island—and the difficulty of addressing it because of the residents’ conservative political beliefs, and the bit about reducing water bottle waste all to be of great interest even though I live in California.

Thank you for sending me your wonderful print magazine—if it was only a digital format, I probably would not get around to reading it at all. But Terp is on my coffee table magazine stack until it is read and then it is recycled. Thank you.

JENNIFER BURNS ’88, DEERFIELD BEACH, FLA., VIA TERP ONLINE

DEBORAH PRAGER BURSTYN ’75, WALNUT CREEK, CALIF.

BARBARA JEFFE ’63, ROCKVILLE, MD

ARCHIVIST EMERITA ANNE TURKOS RESPONDS:

I appreciate your letting me know about the earlier time period that this piece was in place. I only wish it had still been here when I started work on campus in 1985!

I’m pretty sure the cow in the DBK story did not die! But she did leave quite a mess!

MEGAN BREWER, VIA TERP ONLINE

New Victory for Old Basketball

P H O T O S B Y J O H N T. C O N S O L I

WINTER 2018

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ON THE MALL

CAMPUS LIFE

Housing’s Bright Future

1

Solar House Scores at Global Contest

Water and Waste Recycling: Rainwater from the roof and “graywater” from sinks flow into filtering equipment to produce fresh water.

Food waste becomes compost for vegetable plants and landscaping, and wasted heat is reused by mechanical systems.

2

imagine a house with no utility bills that grows food for you and fights climate change.

That’s what University of Maryland architecture, engineering and agriculture students designed and built to compete at the U.S. Department of Energy’s 2017 Solar Decathlon in October in Denver. umd came in second, just behind a team from Switzerland, impressing the judges particularly in the innovation category while adding to the university’s history of strong finishes in the competition: A Maryland team won in 2011 and took second in 2007.

The team named the 994-square-foot house react—Resilient Adaptive Climate Technology—and it lives up to its name with a host of systems to make life easier, cheaper, healthier and more environmentally friendly.—cc Watch the react house come to life at terp.umd.edu.

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Clean Power: react’s roof-mounted solar electric array powers house systems and squirrels away excess energy in onsite batteries, allowing occupants to live off the grid.

3 Built-in Wellness: react’s passive ventilation system is designed to circulate fresh air, with automated temperature and humidity control.

The layout ensures a house filled with natural sunlight, and provides living spaces that blend with the outdoor environment.

5

Healthy Homegrown Food: A hydroponics system grows nutrient-rich plants without soil inside the “greencourt,” a combination courtyard and greenhouse.

4

Automated Efficiency: Computers regulate systems in sync with occupants and the environment—suggesting, for instance, the most efficient times of day to do resource-intensive tasks like laundry.

I L L U S T R AT I O N C O U R T E SY O F T H E S O L A R D E C AT H L O N T E A M

More Life for Bioengineering

New A. James Clark Hall to Innovate in Burgeoning Field the university of maryland

has opened the doors to expanded leadership in fusing cutting-edge engineering and life-enhancing medical care.

Classes began in January in A. James Clark Hall, the new home for the university’s Fischell Department of Bioengineering and Robert E. Fischell Institute for Biomedical Devices.

The 184,000-square-foot building, made possible by generous gifts from renowned builder A. James Clark ’50 and biomedical pioneer Fischell M.S. ’53, features bioimaging, computational and fabrication labs, flexible classrooms and collaborative student project spaces—all with the goal of improving human health.

P H O T O B Y J O H N T. C O N S O L I

“Clark Hall embodies the future of multidisciplinary engineering with human impact,” Darryll J. Pines, dean of the A. James Clark School of Engineering and Farvardin professor of engineering, said at the Nov. 10 ribbon-cutting.

“These state-of-the-art facilities will create the next generation of engineers who will advance human health worldwide, transforming millions of lives.”

The equipment and facilities will enhance scholarship and research under way in such areas as targeted drug delivery, pathogen detection, dna and protein sequencing, and mass and optical spectrometry.

Spaces such as the Leidos Innovation Lab, where students will work on research and designs, will

“Clark Hall embodies the future of multidisciplinary engineering with human impact. These state-of-the-art facilities will create the next generation of engineers who will advance human health worldwide, transforming millions of lives.”

DARRYLL J. PINES, DEAN OF THE A. JAMES CLARK SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND FARVARDIN PROFESSOR OF ENGINEERING

strengthen the fastest-growing major on campus, now with more than 400 undergraduates.

And with its proximity to D.C. and an array of tech companies, research institutes and federal labs, Clark Hall is intended to be a hub for public- and private-sector partnerships.

“My father felt the university’s decision to name the School of Engineering after him was the most meaningful honor he would ever receive,” said Courtney Clark Pastrick, board chair of the A. James & Alice B. Clark Foundation. “I think he would be humbled to have this cornerstone of innovation named in his honor.”

Take a virtual tour of Clark Hall at terp.umd.edu.

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ON THE MALL

CAMPUS LIFE

Hunger Gains

Campus Pantry Fills Growing Need Among Terps

A Walk to Remember

New Tour Explores African-American History on Campus from the university’s antebellum founding through the present day, Terp life has been shaped by more than just those who wrote the official version of history. There was a time when students and visitors of color were outsiders here, but through the sacrifices of earlier pioneers—reflected in our campus fabric—each brick and blade of glass belongs to them as well.

That’s the message of a new African-American history tour of the University of Maryland campus. Commissioned by the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, it expands on a presentation that Kim Nickerson, assistant dean, equity administrator and diversity officer in the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences, has shared on campus, and draws from the 2009 “Knowing Our History” report led by Ira Berlin, Distinguished University Professor of African-American History; University Libraries; and other sources.

The tour is available online at umd.edu/blackhistorytour, and will soon be available in a brochure at the Visitor Center.

“I envision someone seeing this and feeling like they’re not alone or out of place,” Nickerson says.

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ot even a week into the semester, the calls requesting emergency appointments at the Campus Pantry start coming in. Graduate students, commuters, Terps juggling studies and young families. Could they please stop by the food bank to fill a grocery bag?

On the lush University of Maryland campus, so rich in talent among its faculty and students, it’s a disconcerting fact that a portion of this community is hungry.

A small survey conducted on campus in 2015 found that 15 percent of undergraduates were food-insecure, meaning they lacked consistent access to safe and healthy foods.

Another 16 percent were at risk of becoming food-insecure, according to the survey by Assistant Professor Devon Payne-Sturges in environmental health and Allison Lilly Tjaden m.p.h. ’12, assistant director in Dining Services.

The pair partnered this fall with the University Counseling Center to survey a larger, broader population on campus and determine the full scope of the problem—and what’s driving it.

“There is more struggle going on than many people think,” Payne-Sturges says.

She and several colleagues nationwide

P H O T O S B Y J O H N T. C O N S O L I

recently published a study in The Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics finding that food insecurity is a “major” public health concern among postsecondary students in the U.S. Their review of dozens of single-campus studies and reports also showed a consistent link between food insecurity and financial independence, poor health and adverse academic outcomes.

The initial campus survey, whose results were published in The American Journal of Health Promotion, bore that out, finding that students who were minorities, receiving multiple forms of financial aid or experiencing housing problems were more likely to be at risk or food-insecure.

The new survey included more than 4,000 random undergraduate and graduate students from across the campus, according to Yu-Wei Wang, assistant director of the Counseling Center and a clinical associate professor. Results were expected to be available in early 2018.

One obvious intervention is food banks; the College and University Food Bank Alliance counts 566 members nationwide serving students, with the goal of helping them to stay in school and succeed. Maryland’s Campus Pantry opened in Fall 2014 and served 52 students in its first year; 315 visited there in 2016–17, typically several times.

Clients say they rely on the pantry as they struggle with late-arriving scholarships, or their parents’ joblessness or mortgage problems.

“It’s really meaningful in terms of both material support and spiritual one,” says one graduate student. “It shows the sharing spirit

I L L U S T R AT I O N BY J A S O N K E I S L I N G

by Terps, of Terps and for Terps.”

Run by Tjaden, other Dining Services staff and a team of interns and volunteers, the pantry has struggled to overcome some unique obstacles: First, it was housed at a concession stand in Cole Field House, meaning patrons had to be handed a bag rather than select foods themselves due to lack of space.

Now based in a small conference room in the Health Center’s basement, the pantry allows guests to choose their cans of soup, bags of rice and cereal boxes from the shelves, but they have to squeeze around the conference table and stacks of totes, and the knee-high refrigerator limits dairy options.

Open Fridays from 9 to 5 (plus for emergency appointments), the pantry also shares produce harvested each week from Terp Farm in Upper Marlboro, Md. A new effort to raise $900,000 will fund moving the pantry just around the corner in the building to a space five times larger, with a kitchen for cooking lessons, meeting rooms for one-on-one consultations with social workers and the potential for an exterior door, so the pantry could be open later than the Health Center’s traditional daytime hours.

“Our mission is to alleviate food insecurity on campus,” Tjaden says. “There are so many interconnected issues, and if we have the opportunity to connect students with other services to address whatever else is going on with them, that’s where we’re focused.”—lb

To support the fundraising effort for an expanded Campus Pantry, visit sagiving.umd.edu.

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Dai’lyn (left) and Jai’lyn Merriweather

STRIDE FOR STRIDE Twin Track Stars From Washington State Look for Identical Success at Maryland

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it takes a lot to tell identical twins Dai’lyn and Jai’lyn Merriweather apart. Reviewing their records dominating the track and field scene in Washington State doesn’t help.

As seniors at Union High School in a Portland, Ore., suburb, the duo each won three state titles in spring 2017: Jai’lyn in the women’s 400-meter and Dai’lyn in the 200, and together in a pair of relays.

Now freshmen at the University of Maryland, the two begin the season in January with a 2,800-mile change in scenery but even higher expectations for themselves, including the goal of competing for the 2020 U.S. Olympic team in Tokyo.

P H O T O B Y J O H N T. C O N S O L I

CAMPUS LIFE

ON THE MALL

SPORTS BRIEFS

“We love each other—we’re sisters. But if we’re both in the race at the same time, it’s still a race.

We’re still competing.”

JAI’LYN MERRIWEATHER

“We wanted to get away from home and be in a new environment and a new place in general,” Dai’lyn says. “But mainly, we’re really putting all of our trust in (head umd Coach Andrew Valmon) and the training that we’re going to do and the things that he tells us that we can accomplish and the things we know we can accomplish together as a team.”

Valmon, who actively recruited the twins to Maryland, admires their willingness to take risks.

“In track and field, it’s not always the person who speeds up at the end of the race. It’s the person that can slow down the least,” he says. “And I think that they understand that if they’re really fit and have an open mind, the sky’s the limit.”

Success on the track for the Merriweather twins seemed inevitable. Their father, and sprints coach throughout their track career, Dominique, won the 1992 state title in the 200 at Benson High in Portland and was part of four state championships there before running at the University of Reno and Concordia.

Valmon certainly has the resume to guide the twins. He earned gold medals on the United States 4x400 relay teams in the 1988 and 1992 Summer Olympics.

The two acknowledge that their training regimen will change drastically for the Olympics, and another level of focus will be required to qualify.

“They’re two different categories,” Dai’lyn says. “You can’t just get there and–” “Not be prepared,” Jai’lyn finishes.

While they may seem completely alike, Dai’lyn intends to major in business and supply chain management, while Jai’lyn is interested in criminal justice. Jai’lyn describes herself as reserved; Dai’lyn is more outgoing.

Dai’lyn is an adept whistler—Jai’lyn can barely eke out a tune.

They also run different events, though it’s possible that they may race against each other this season.

“We love each other—we’re sisters. But if we’re both in the race at the same time, it’s still a race,” Jai’lyn says. “We’re still competing.”—do

Headed to World Cup FORMER UMD MEN’S SOCCER

player Rodney

Wallace helped his native Costa Rica land a spot in the 2018 World Cup taking place in Russia in June. In the 95th minute of a qualifying match against Honduras, he assisted on a header that drew a tie and punched Costa Rica’s ticket to the finals. Wallace, a standout midfielder for the Terps, recorded 10 goals and four assists in two years, including the 2008 NCAA championship. He now plays for New York City FC, scoring 23 goals over an eight-year career.

Kicker Makes History UMD FOOTBALL PLACEKICKER

Henry Darmstad-

ter MBA ’18 set a school record Sept. 9 with nine extra points in a 63–17 win over Towson. Two weeks later, he kicked a career-high 51-yard field goal in a 31-24 win over Minnesota. The former Georgetown kicker set records in field goals made and field goal percentage, twice receiving second-team all-Patriot League honors.

Basketball Alum Honored FORMER TERPS BASKETBALL STAR

Joe Smith

was honored in October at the Naismith Trophy 50th anniversary celebration. Smith received the trophy, awarded to the nation’s top men’s and women’s college basketball players, after the 1994–95 season, when he averaged 20.2 points per game and led the Terps to the Sweet Sixteen in the NCAA tournament. The No. 1 pick in the 1995 NBA draft by the Golden State Warriors, Smith averaged 10.9 points per game and 6.4 rebounds over a 16-year career.

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ON THE MALL

CAMPUS LIFE

A Harmonious Chord

Graduate Students Live in Retirement Community as Artists-in-Residence

hen school of music graduate students Samantha Flores and Matthew Rynes moved into their new community this fall, they could have introduced themselves to their new neighbors with a loaf of banana bread. Instead, they brought their cello and clarinet. And the neighbors weren’t other graduate students—they were all over age 55.

Flores and Rynes are the first artistsin-residence at Collington, a retirement community in Bowie, Md., receiving free room and board for the year in exchange for organizing programming for the residents.

“It’s another level of outreach, where you not only go to the people but you’re part of a community and live in the community,” says Flores, the cellist.

The project, suggested by a Collington resident who’d read about a similar program in Baltimore, “seemed in keeping with the kind of engagement that we wanted to be involved in, reaching out to various parts of the surrounding community and giving our students an opportunity to interact with members of these communities” while

“It’s another level of outreach, where you not only go to the people but you’re part of a community and live in the community.”

SAMANTHA FLORES M.M. ’18

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teaching students about audience-specific programming, says Jason Geary, director of the School of Music.

Graduate students were invited to apply for the positions and a faculty committee selected four finalists, who went to Collington for a final interview with residents.

“We were looking for students who we thought had the ability to engage with residents, students with fairly outgoing personalities who had creative ideas about what to do with an opportunity like this,” says Geary.

Rynes and Flores are teaching musicreading classes to Collington’s large choir, as well as performing in twice-monthly recitals, bringing in other School of Music students for a chamber music series, playing on Friday afternoons and in “pop-up” events, and taking residents to campus for other concerts.

“What drew me to the project was the idea of concert programming, the idea of running a chamber music association in miniature, almost,” says clarinetist Rynes, adding that graduate students in music often “have the opportunity to start chamber music programs after they leave school, but most don’t have the experience or logistical understanding to do that.”

Living among retirees is less of a culture shock than Rynes expected—his neighbors may decorate their homes with pictures of their grandchildren, “but it just feels like I’m living in an apartment complex,” he says.

Flores has also acclimated to the age difference. “I like the fact that all these people are very interesting and have had interesting lives,” she says. “They’re just curious to know what we do and why.”

Resident Carol Kempske sees the project from an almost anthropological lens. “It helps us relate to young people, and I think it gives young people a better understanding of those who are their grandparents’ age or older.”

There’s just one intergenerational quirk that baffles Rynes: “The building is dead quiet around 8 at night.”—sl

P H O T O B Y J O H N T. C O N S O L I

Putting Health at the Center UMD Contributes to New Wellness Hub in Underserved Prince George’s County on a friday morning, pairs of umd students scatter along a stretch of road in Temple Hills, Md., lined with barbershops, nail salons and laundromats. Their mission: Talk to community members about what health services they feel are lacking in the area—gaps in service that could be filled by the Catholic Charities-Susan D. Mona Center.

The health center opened in the fall through a partnership between Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Washington, Doctors Community Hospital and the School of Public Health’s Maryland Center for Health Equity. The Mona Center is a welcome addition to an area where a 2016 Prince George’s County Health Department report found a lack of health care providers contributed to residents’ poor health outcomes.

“It’s an example of our reach as a land-grant institution beyond the walls of our College Park campus and into a part of the county where we’ve had no presence,” says Stephen B. Thomas, professor and director of the Center for Health Equity.

Donated to Catholic Charities by the Mona family, the 12,000-square-foot building that houses the health center—formerly a Joe Theismann’s restaurant—had fallen into dilapidation. Now, Catholic Charities runs a dental clinic and Doctors Community Hospital primary care practitioners see patients on the first floor. Pro bono attorneys affiliated with Catholic Charities offer services

Congressman Addresses Winter Grads

for immigration issues and civil law matters.

Upstairs, the Center for Health Equity and other partners from across the umd campus will coordinate a health and wellness center, with exercise space, mental health counseling and a teaching kitchen where visitors will learn how to cook healthy food using produce grown on a community garden (planted on a former overflow parking lot).

The facility, Thomas says, is “specifically designed to help people who are suffering from preventable chronic disease to get back on track in healthy lifestyles in terms of eating, physical activity, mental health and managing stress.”

Public health students have played a role in the center’s design. A Fearless Ideas course, called Redesigning Health Care: Developing a Clinic to Meet Community Needs and co-taught by Thomas and Susan Passmore, assistant director of the Center for Health Equity, has been offered for three semesters and gives students the opportunity to learn how to build a clinic that meets the needs of residents.

“Before taking the class, I didn’t necessarily look at what the community needs versus what I can do,” says Jazmin Aldridge ’17, m.h.a ’19. “My idea might not be what’s best for the community as a whole. Now I try to always understand the needs of the person I’m trying to address the problem for.”—sl

a posthumous Bachelor of Humane

graduates on Dec. 19 and received an

Born and raised in Baltimore,

honorary doctorate of public service.

Cummings became the first African

Letters degree. He was killed on cam-

American to be named speaker pro

pus last spring, just before he was to

degrees were conferred, Cummings

tem of the Maryland House of Dele-

graduate from Bowie State University.

encouraged graduates to direct their

gates. He has represented the state’s

CUMMINGS (D-Md.)

ambition toward a greater good.

7th Congressional District in the U.S.

young man whose life and death

delivered the winter

“Our personal dreams mean nothing

House of Representatives since 1996.

have touched our community so

commencement

if they do not benefit other people,”

U.S. REP. ELIJAH E.

address to UMD

I L L U S T R AT I O N BY G A B R I E L A H E R N A N D E Z

Before an estimated 4,600

he said.

Also at the ceremony, 2nd Lt. Richard W. Collins III was awarded

“This is a fitting memorial to a

deeply,” UMD President Wallace D. Loh said.—LB

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ON THE MALL

5.25.56

CAMPUS LIFE

Good News for Old News

5.21.63

11.1.13

Decades of Student Newspapers Go Online

want to read about a grandparent’s athletic exploits? Research the civil rights era at the University of Maryland? Or revel in your own memories?

Since 1910, students have chronicled the university’s day-to-day life, newsworthy events and history-making milestones in newspapers, from The Triangle to M.A.C. Weekly to University Review to The Diamondback.

All it took to access that past was a vehicle to get to a library, microfilm-maneuvering expertise and copious amounts of caffeine.

But this fall, the university completed the two-year process to digitize these newspapers from 1910–71. That’s 3,502 issues, 28,298 pages and 190,000 articles. Phase II, reaching into the mid-1980s (papers got a lot thicker in the ’70s and ’80s), was expected to be up by the end of the year. A crowdfunding campaign on Launchumd in November raised $26,543 to complete the project in 2018.

“This is one of the most important records of student life and this campus,” says Kate Dohe, digital programs and initiatives manager in University Libraries. “It’s a huge part of our legacy, and it’s deeply important that it’s accessible to anyone on this planet with an internet connection.”—lb

Explore the new database at lib.umd.edu/ univarchives/student-newspapers.

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12.1.69

9.16.57

11.5.43

1.11.32

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E X P L O R AT I O N S

ON THE MALL

No One Left Behind

Terps Help Investigate WWII Crash Site 11.23.16

11.1.38

11.19.63

world war ii ended nearly 73 years ago, but for the families of missing U.S. troops, victory didn’t bring closure.

Some of those lost included the service members aboard a military aircraft that crashed in the Alps outside of Linz, Austria. Thanks to the efforts of umd faculty and students, their descendants may soon have an enduring family mystery solved.

The six-week archaeological field school last summer was a collaboration with the U.S. Defense pow/mia Accounting Agency (dpaa) to survey the crash site and possibly identify the remains of a handful of the nearly 73,000 Americans still missing from wwii.

“I thought there would be no better way to spend my field school than on a really good cause,” says Sharon Ridge ’18, the granddaughter of a wwii veteran and fiancée of a Marine.

Led by forensic anthropologist and lecturer Marilyn London and Adam Fracchia Ph.D. ’14, the field school’s co-director and lead archaeologist, umd and University of Vienna students and faculty headed to an isolated part of northern Austria. (dpaa is keeping confidential all specifics of the project, including its exact location, the date and circumstances of the crash, and information about the plane and its passengers.)

What followed was weeks of painstaking and difficult work, as students climbed a large slope daily to reach the forested site above the meadow of a working farm.

All items, from pieces of aircraft to animal bones (which provide clues about how the environment has changed over time), were labeled, photographed and entered into a database, then sent to a dpaa laboratory for analysis.

Results won’t be available for at least 18 months, says London, who has worked on recoveries such as United Airlines Flight 93.

Nick Spielman ’17, an Army veteran, found it reassuring to see how seriously the military takes its credo of not leaving any service members behind.

“It’s very easy to say it,” he says. “It’s entirely different to go out and do it.”—lf

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FA C U LT Y Q & A SANDRA KNIGHT

changing some weather patterns. These hurricanes seem to be more intense. The waters are warmer, and that’s the fuel for the hurricanes. They went from a tropical storm to Category 5 really fast.

Calm, Before and After Storms

Disaster Resilience Expert Works to Prevent Damage, or Rebuild andra knight has flown over interstates and homes submerged by floods, examined communities toppled by tornadoes and worked with cities and states following the type of damage that overwhelmed Houston, Florida and Puerto Rico last summer.

Knight, a senior research engineer in the Center for Disaster Resilience, has learned about such devastation while in senior positions at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

A specialist in disaster resilience and prevention, she advises communities on how to rebuild and shares with Terp the mistakes that she too often sees before a natural disaster strikes.—do

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What lessons can we take away from the hurricanes of 2017?

To really prepare, we need to think about the impossible. No one imagined we could have gotten rainfall like we did in Houston, or three large hurricanes right in a row. We have to think well beyond high-probability events and begin to look at low-probability, high-impact events.

We have to think about how we design where we live. Zoning, development requirements, building codes—those sorts of things from an urban planning and engineering perspective are really what make people safe in the long run.

How is climate change affecting storm damage and flooding?

We’re still learning how climate change is impacting precipitation, but it’s definitely

What can people in storm- and flood-prone areas do?

We spend a lot of time thinking about retirement or maybe who we’re going to marry, but we should think about where we live and when we make an investment in our home, we need to do our research and make sure it’s safe for our family. If you live in a flood zone and you have a mortgage, you have a one in four chance of your house flooding. Eighty percent of the people flooded (in Houston) didn’t have insurance.

What’s something memorable you’ve seen regarding disaster recovery?

When I was in fema in 2011, hundreds of tornadoes came across the South and the Midwest in the spring. After the disaster, my team would go in and determine how the wind destroyed the buildings and then used that information to improve building codes. We had a clinic afterwards with all the local and state emergency managers and the mayors of these places. And I remember hearing this mayor of a small town that lost 27 people. He was a local farmer, and he talked about how he wanted to build back stronger to save people’s lives. Those kind of compelling stories make you get up and go to work every day and want to do it better.

P H O T O B Y J O H N T. C O N S O L I

E X P L O R AT I O N S

Unlikely Library Loans Students Needing Study Break Borrow Sports Equipment

ON THE MALL

Diversity Research Center Opens SOCCER BALL, FOOTBALL, KICKBALL

FRISBEE

THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND

has launched the Center for Diversity and Inclusion in Higher Education, a national hub for research, policy and professional standards

university libraries offers more than books, computers and nap-ready chairs to help students succeed. How about a yoga mat, light therapy lamp or hula-hoop?

Studies show that being active improves alertness, attention and motivation. So in addition to the laptops, phone chargers and textbooks available year-round, students can borrow all manner of sporting equipment during finals week, thanks to campus partners like University Recreation and Wellness and Bikeumd.

Here are some of the items available for a brain-boosting study break.—lb

in this field.

“We will engage with a broad range of thought leaders with expertise in diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education

HAMMOCK

HULA-HOOP

representing diverse communities, governmental agencies, higher education institutions and international partners to set an ambitious agenda for the development and distribution of research, scholarship and best practices,” said Roger Worthington, interim associate provost and chief diversity officer,

BIKE HELMET AND PUMP

YOGA MAT

and professor. “We will work with colleges and universities to think through critical issues and develop customized plans to help move them forward.”

He will lead the center, housed in the Counseling, Higher Education, and Special Education Department

For more information, visit lib.umd.edu/tlc/equipment

of the College of Education, with Di-

EXERCISE RESISTANCE BANDS

Study Asks Big Questions About Big Data THE EMERGING FIELD of big data

analytics is developing techniques to rein in the chaos that fills the

I L L U S T R AT I O N S BY R Y U M I S U N G

JUMP ROPE

rector Candace M. Moore, assistant clinical professor.—LB

“Whether mobile phone apps,

internet—from old social media

million project to tackle the issue

posts to government records to

in a project called “Pervasive Data

website search engines, wearable

stats from your latest run—but

Ethics for Computational Re-

technology or social platforms,

few ethical guidelines exist for

search.” Headed by Katie Shilton,

consumer information has become

researchers or companies that

associate professor of information

highly trackable and available,”

use the data.

studies, it will study issues includ-

Shilton says. “This has resulted in

ing user consent, risk assessment

an ethically questionable free-for-

and regulations.

all in research and marketing.”—CC

The National Science Foundation has funded a four-year, $3

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Out of Their Shells Researchers’ Turtle Program Helps Shy Kids Connect

start with a room full of cars, stuffed animals, books, dolls, action figures, robots, building blocks and balloons, and then send in a group of preschoolers.

Everything you might expect—relentless exploration, high-pitched chatter, a chase, maybe a dispute over a coveted electronic dog—is the opposite of what’s happening in a playroom in the Benjamin Building. Like magnets repelling each other, the 4- and 5-year-olds move apart to play solo, periodically glancing warily at the others.

While practically everyone experiences shyness sometimes, it’s so painfully pronounced in these children that they’re at elevated risk of becoming isolated, suffering from low self-esteem and developing anxiety disorders later, according to previous research at the University of Maryland and elsewhere.

That’s why they’re on campus on a Sunday in October participating in the Turtle Program, an eight-week early intervention developed at umd to help shy children come out of their shells. Its point isn’t to create social butterflies, says Andrea Chronis-Tuscano, a professor of psychology and developer of the program, but children unafraid to join a team, raise their hands in class or participate at show-and-tell.

“This is not about changing who they are, but instead helping them to function within their social world,” Chronis-Tuscano says.

It’s important to intervene before debilitating shyness becomes a lasting part of their social identities, the researchers say.

“Once the extremely shy, reticent child enters elementary school, he or she may not be well received by peers,” says Ken Rubin, a professor of human development and quantitative methodology and co-developer of the program. “It’s now well established that they

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are very often rejected, victimized and excluded from ongoing peer networks.”

The program is unique because parents get real-time coaching in how to deal with children’s social wariness during actual interactions. That could be crucial, because parents seem to play such a big role in either deepening children’s inhibitions or helping to overcome them.

“Maybe their parents don’t enroll them in sports … or take them to a birthday party,” says Chronis-Tuscano. “They see others having fun with each other

“This is not about changing who they are, but instead helping them to function within their social world.”

ANDREA CHRONIS-TUSCANO

while their child is sitting under the table holding onto their leg.

Over time, they step in and protect their children more and more because, naturally, they don’t like seeing them distressed.”

A $3.1 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health is funding a study, led by Chronis-Tuscano and Rubin, comparing the Turtle Program to Cool Little Kids, an early intervention for shyness used worldwide that doesn’t include coaching.

In a preliminary study of the Turtle Program, parents and teachers reported improvement

I L L U S T R AT I O N S BY J A S O N K E I S L I N G

in the children who participated, and parents were observed becoming more positively responsive to their children. If the current, large-scale study establishes its validity, the program would likely become an international standard.

During one session in the fall, the effort to break the cycle of shyness plays out in three rooms: In the playroom, several University of Maryland students teach social skills and facilitate child-directed group play. In another room, a parent sits with her daughter as the child picks up different toys. The mother wears an earpiece, and a doctoral student therapist observes and provides guidance.

“Excellent labeled praise!” she tells the mother, who’s been instructed to avoid commands, criticisms and questions, but to provide plenty of praise and positive commentary on behavior she wants to see more of.

In the final room, other parents watch the pair on closed-circuit TV—they’ll all take turns in the spotlight—and discuss each other’s performances with Christina Danko, an assistant research professor of psychology who’s facilitating today’s session. The point of the training, she says later, is to teach parents how to encourage children to navigate anxiety-producing social situations. Next week, she tells the group, their homework is to praise any interactions their kids have at the store, the playground or elsewhere.

“Any kind of approach behavior from your children you can pay attention to—that’s going to be so powerful for them,” she says.

A Germantown father who asked that his name not be used said he might have been misinterpreting his 4-year-old daughter’s behavior around adults she doesn’t know well.

“I guess I thought she was unapologetic if she didn’t have the time for someone she didn’t want to talk to,” he said. “I feel like I’m more cognizant of what’s going on now—that she is uncomfortable and impeded in these interactions. I just want her to be okay.”—cc

Regional Flavor

UMD, Flying Dog Partner on Beer Research with craft beer fans increasingly opting to “drink local,” as the saying goes, the University of Maryland has teamed up with the state’s largest brewer to see if farmers can grow beer ingredients locally.

Flying Dog Brewery, a Frederick-based independent craft brewer and the nation’s 32nd-biggest producer, is supporting multi-year trials of 24 strains of hops— pungent flowers that both flavor and preserve beer—at the Western Maryland Research and Education Center in Keedysville.

Most North American hops come from high deserts in the Pacific Northwest— a far cry from Maryland’s moister, more southerly climate.

But the upsurge of small breweries means more Marylanders are planting hops. The umd trials will help them know what they’re getting into, says Bryan Butler, the umd Extension agent who’s running the experiment.

“We’re doing everything we can to make it work, but we’re also being realistic about it,” he says.

Maryland hops would mean easier logistics and direct communication with farmers, provided that the crop is competitive in quality and price, says Matt Brophy, Flying Dog’s chief operating officer.

The brewery went halfsies with the university for a harvesting machine at the test garden, and debuted an experimental beer made with umd hops in its taproom. This spring it plans to market beers with hops from Maryland farms.

Maryland growers might find they can’t compete with the major production regions—or, Brophy says, they might discover a variety “that does excellently here, and results in a really unique beer.”—cc

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Wake-up Call

Energy Drink Buzz Increases Substance Abuse Risk, Study Finds unleash your inner beast. Party like a rock star. It’ll give you wings!

Those are some of the promises of energy drinks. What their makers don’t advertise is that sustained consumption of the popular caffeine and sugar bombs also appears to contribute to increased drug and alcohol abuse among young adults.

That’s the recent finding published in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence by Amelia Arria, a professor of public health. She’s studied energy drinks for more than a decade, ever since a research assistant on a project measuring student health introduced her to rows of the beverages at a local store.

“All I could think was, ‘Wow, in my day we had orange juice,’” she says. “Through a questionnaire, we found that nearly 25 percent of students reported using them in the previous 12 months. Two years later, it was 66 percent.”

The newly established link between energy drinks and subsequent illicit use of drugs like cocaine and prescription stimulants is based on a multi-year study of 1,099 college students.

Those with a “persistent trajectory” of use—about half the sample—were significantly more likely than non-users to engage in substance abuse and have alcohol problems at age 25. Those who scaled back on energy drinks were less likely to use other drugs, Arria says.

One troubling aspect of energy drinks is their frequent pairing with booze. “Energy drinks might mask how drunk you feel, leading to more serious alcohol-related consequences,” she says.

Beyond caffeine, the drinks also contain substances like guarana, tuarine and inositol. They can affect the heart and other organs, and haven’t been tested for safety in combination, says Dr. Stacy Fisher, head of the adult congenital heart disease program at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

“There is clear, mounting data of adverse events, and there’ve clearly been reports of multiple, well-documented deaths associated with energy drinks,” she says. “I think it’s better to avoid them, and I think it’s really important to pay attention to your own family history of sudden death and heart disease.”

Arria advocates for stricter government oversight, and says the fda should apply the same maximum caffeine standard to energy drinks it does to traditional carbonated soft drinks.

Students don’t need more of a chemical buzz, she says. “Ironically, sleep is the very best energy drink.”—cc

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Drone-testing Facility Takes Flight THE NATIONAL CAPITAL REGION’S only outdoor

drone testing site has opened in the university’s Discovery District, even if technically, it’s indoors.

UMD

and the A. James

Clark School of Engineering were allowed to proceed with the Fearless Flight Facility (F3) in the tightly controlled airspace around Washington, D.C., because it’s contained by a giant net canopy 300 feet across and 50 feet high.

The setup allows students and faculty to develop and test unmanned aerial systems in all kinds of wind and weather while satisfying national security requirements.

“F3 allows us to pursue an aggressive UAS research agenda that would not be possible without the protection of a netted enclosure,” says Darryll Pines, Clark School dean and Farvardin professor of engineering.—CC

I L L U S T R AT I O N BY J A S O N K E I S L I N G

THE BIG QUESTION

What mainstay of American life will have vanished in 25 years?

ARIEL H. BIERBAUM ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, URBAN STUDIES AND PLANNING PROGRAM

—

Yellow school buses will become obsolete, due to a rise in complicated routes, increased costs, decreased public investment in education and innovations in transportation. Some school districts already rely on

but also provide residents with centralized control of

The number of workplace mistakes caused by being

heating and air conditioning, security and motion-detect-

tired, stressed or overwhelmed will fall dramatically.

ing equipment, and even home entertainment systems.

Semi-autonomous machines will adopt more human decision-making capabilities to support those in critical

DAVID SICILIA HENRY KAUFMAN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF FINANCIAL HISTORY

—

school choice, which allows students to attend a school

Realtors are headed for extinction. The occupation owes

outside of their neighborhood. In other places, schools

its existence chiefly to the Multiple Listing Service, a for-

and even school districts are closing and consolidating,

mer monopoly on market information that is rapidly mi-

which also creates complex logistics to get students

grating to the internet. Software is coming that will price

to school. These forces will leave school districts de-

to market with much greater precision and objectivity

pendent on alternatives like public transportation—and

than real estate agents’ intuition. Video property tours

maybe even the flying cars and autonomous vehicles

make scouting from the laptop simple. For more serious

we’ve been promised!

in-person looks, envision bonded paid-by-the-hour docents escorting prospective buyers through properties.

JIM MILKE

Contracts (like wills, powers of attorney, etc.) are easily

PROFESSOR AND CHAIR, DEPARTMENT OF FIRE PROTECTION ENGINEERING

will eliminate real estate agents’ enormous fees.

—

Interest in smart homes and smart buildings will replace standalone smoke detectors with multisensor devices.

One single-control unit will not only sense smoke and heat from fires or carbon monoxide and other pollutants,

I L L U S T R A T I O N / BPYH OGTAOB RCIREELDAI TH E R N A N D E Z

customized online. An increasingly friction-free economy

fields such as health care, aviation and energy. Human performance algorithms will predict work demands and monitor biological signals like heart rate or sweating, then modify task requirements to reduce the risk of cognitive overload.

MARTIN A. WOLLESEN

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, CLARICE SMITH PERFORMING ARTS CENTER

—

The “live” in live performances will be redefined to reflect a major shift in how we consume and participate in arts and entertainment. We are moving further away from shared experiences toward individualized explorations through virtual and holographic performances that will be anywhere we are. Not only will we be able to have a holographic orchestra perform in our living room, we will finally be able to bring back Elvis from the dead.

MONIFA VAUGHN-COOKE ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

—

What’s your answer? Share it at terp.umd.edu/BigQ1 Suggest a future question at terpfeedback.umd.edu

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I L L U S T R AT I O N / P H O T O C R E D I T

E W SCH O L A RS H I P S FOR INCOMING AND TRANSFER S T U D E N T S that increase college affordability and access. Graduate fellowships and expanded scholarships for generations of promising University of Maryland students. Funding to recruit high-level faculty across campus who will pursue research opening new frontiers.

New facilities that will cement the A. James Clark School of Engineering’s stature among the world’s finest.

This is what an unprecedented new investment of $219,486,000 from the A. James & Alice B. Clark Foundation will do to transform the university.

The largest gift ever given to a Washington metro area public institution, “Building Together: An Investment for Maryland” celebrates the legacy of the late A. James Clark ’50, noted philanthropist and a builder of modern Washington, D.C., and his belief in the power of education.

“The University of Maryland played an unparalleled role in my dad’s academic preparation and his success as a business leader,” said Courtney Clark Pastrick, board chair, A. James & Alice B. Clark Foundation. “This gift is symbolic of his profound gratitude and commitment to ensuring the best education is accessible and affordable to all

I L L U S T R AT I O N / P H O T O C R E D I T

with the will to work hard.”

“This investment is historic in scope and transformational in impact, and I do not say this lightly,” said University of Maryland President Wallace D. Loh. “Access to higher education is essential, if we are to solve urgent national problems. Creating this path for the most promising students in engineering and other fields may well prove to be Mr. Clark’s greatest legacy.”

As both a philanthropist and the former president and ceo of the Clark Construction Group, A. James Clark invested heavily in his alma mater: He donated millions in his lifetime to grow and strengthen the college that bears his name, and his company developed much of the campus that we see today.

The Foundation named for him and his wife is guided by the Clark family’s belief in the value of hard work and their desire to create immediate impact, backing projects focused on engineering, D.C. education and community, and veteran support.

The monumental investment from the Clark Foundation will enhance the university’s role as a bold leader sparking new innovations that solve today’s problems and forms the foundation of Fearless Ideas: The Campaign for Maryland. The most ambitious and comprehensive fundraising effort in the university’s history, it is scheduled to launch in Spring 2018.

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“A GIANT OF A BUILDER” A. James Clark knew what a difference a scholarship could make.

Born in 1927 to an insurance salesman and a homemaker, Clark spent his childhood summers earning 10 cents an hour working on his grandmother’s Virginia farm. His family couldn’t afford to send him to Cornell University, but he earned a scholarship to the University of Maryland. Every day he hitchhiked from their home in Bethesda to pursue an education in civil engineering.

Shortly after he graduated in 1950, a modest local firm hired Clark as a field engineer for a job at the university. Over the next 60 years, Clark transformed it into one of the nation’s largest construction companies.

Under his leadership, it became the first builder to use tower cranes, which greatly reduced build time and labor costs, and put Hyman Construction on the cutting edge of construction technology. In 1977, Clark founded Omni Construction, a subsidiary of Hyman, and in 1996, the two companies merged to become the Clark Construction Group.

With a hands-on approach that continued well into his 80s, Clark spent time in the field, visiting jobsites, climbing ladders and learning about the latest innovations in construction.

His company’s portfolio of projects grew nationwide to include convention centers, sports complexes, museums, government buildings and of course, a large part of his alma mater’s modern campus.

Clark donated $15 million in 1994 to endow undergraduate scholarships at the engineering school; it was later renamed in honor of his contributions and leadership in the field of engineering. In 2005, Clark established a $30 million endowment to provide need-based support for high-performing and diverse Clark School undergraduate engineering students.

Then, inspired by his interest in biosciences, Clark made a $15 million gift in 2012 to support the design and construction of A. James Clark Hall. Dedicated in November, it will serve as a hub for human health innovation in the state and beyond.

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“Mr. Clark embodies everything we can possibly imagine about a great alum, a person who gives back, a person who started from nothing and turned himself into something huge. We owe it to him at the Clark School of Engineering to take to heart one of his famous quotes, ‘We must solve today’s problems.’”

D A R R Y L L P I N E S , D E A N A N D FA R VA R D I N P R O F E S S O R O F E N G I N E E R I N G

“

I’m very appreciative of the (Clark Opportunity) scholarship—it allowed me to go to Maryland and really engulf myself in my academics, and I was able to pursue something I didn’t think was possible with walking onto the Maryland football team.’” allen corbin ’17 Electrical and computer engineering

“

My parents immigrated from South Korea in the early ’90s. It was my parents’ dream for me to go to college and get a good education. And because I received the Clark scholarship, I was able to come out of undergrad debt-free, which allowed me to ultimately pursue my Ph.D.” danny kim ’08 Electrical and computer engineering and fourth-year doctoral student

Clark served as chairman of Clark Enterprises until his death on March 20, 2015, at the age of 87. The New York Times memorialized him as “King of Concrete,” but those who knew Clark described him as private and humble, honest and trustworthy.

“On one hand, he was so human, caring and unpretentious in his beliefs, while on the other hand, he was a giant of a builder who was driven by grand ideas, confidence and achievements,” former UMD President C.D. Mote Jr. said then. “He was the engineer’s engineer.”

PROGRAMS

C LARK DISTINGUISHED CHAIRS

The creation of eight faculty chairs for stellar engineering researchers who directly address engineering’s most critical research areas, such as additive and advanced manufacturing, autonomy and robotics, and energy and sustainability.

C LARK LEADERSHIP CHAIRS

The establishment and endowment of five faculty chairs throughout the campus in interdisciplinary fields that are critical to the knowledge-based economy of the future, such as data analytics, neuroscience, virtual and augmented reality, and cybersecurity.

C LARK DOCTORAL FELLOWS PROGRAM

The transformative investment from the A. James & Alice B. Clark Foundation, a private organization funded by Jim Clark’s family, will propel the University of Maryland and the A. James Clark School of Engineering to the forefront of education and research worldwide by establishing and funding an array of scholarships, assistantships and fellowships, professorships, and communications and capital projects.

Highlights of the investment include: T HE CLARK CHALLENGE FOR MARYLAND PROMISE

A campus-wide matching program that will provide need-based scholarships to hundreds of students every year from all majors. If fully matched by gifts from other donors, this program will establish a $100 million fund to support students with financial need.

A . JAMES CLARK SCHOLARS PROGRAM

A new program providing scholarships to 40 high-performing engineering undergraduates. Reflecting the Clarks’ commitment to the local community, priority will be given to in-state students.

C LARK OPPORTUNITY TRANSFER SCHOLARS PROGRAM

The endowment of a pilot program that will provide need-based scholarships to 40 engineering majors coming from Maryland community colleges.

An endowment supporting 30 additional first-year doctoral fellowships, allowing the Clark School to increase research productivity and graduate more outstanding Ph.D.s every year.

N EW ENGINEERING BUILDING

A new space that secures the university’s stronghold in engineering innovation by helping recruit and retain world-class faculty and facilitating collaborations between disciplines with institutional and business partners.

I DEA FACTORY

An expansion of the Clark School’s signature Jeong H. Kim Engineering Building that will foster innovation with new cutting-edge labs, startup space and areas dedicated to cross-disciplinary research.

M PACT

Also known as the 125th Anniversary Fearless Ideas Mpact Challenge, the A. James Clark School of Engineering’s “moonshot” engineering program to spur innovative engineering research. terp

P H O T O S B Y J O H N T. C O N S O L I ; 3 - D L E T T E R I N G A R T B Y H A I L E Y H W A S H I N , B R I A N G . P A Y N E A N D T E R R A P I N W O R K S

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T H E

TO

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I L L U S T R AT I O N / P H O T O C R E D I T

O F

THE KIND OF MEDICINE THAT EXISTS ONLY IN SCIENCE FICTION—WHERE FLESH AND MACHINE MERGE AND NEW BODY PARTS ARE FABRICATED ON DEMAND—IS EDGING CLOSER TO THE REAL WORLD. This coming transformation in health care is part of a broader upheaval in manufacturing that’s already in full flower: 3-D printing. Think of it as the next industrial revolution, changing how things of all sorts are produced as dramatically as the advent of 19th-century factories and 20th-century automation did.

Though it’s called “printing,” forget about office machines shooting ink onto a flat page. 3-D printers build up objects of plastic, metal and other materials one layer at a time (which is why it’s also called “additive manufacturing”). The process can create intricate shapes directly from digital design files, bypassing the need for complicated molds or machining tools and techniques.

University of Maryland researchers are using the world’s most advanced 3-D printers, including ones that use lasers to solidify polymer resins into medical devices tinier than the diameter of a human hair. Other printers at umd can fabricate precise replicas of human anatomy from materials already infused with living human cells, a process called bioprinting.

I L L U S T R AT I O N / P H O T O C R E D I T

WW I NI N TE TR E R2 0 20 1 81 8 2 72 7

“Additive manufacturing literally changes the way people can design and create things,” says Jim Zahniser, assistant dean of engineering information technology for the A. James Clark School of Engineering and founder of Terrapin Works, which coordinates 3-D printing on campus. “You can build amazingly complex objects replicating very intricate structures in the body you could not make any other way.”

Physicians, scientists and engineers are working to better understand how human systems function and how to replicate functions as basic as oxygen and nutrient delivery throughout a synthesized body part, says John Fisher, professor and chair of the Fischell Department of Bioengineering.

“The printing technology is very capable— it’s already there,” he says. “That’s actually the easy part. It’s the biology that’s hard.”

Even as they pursue the ultimate goal of human replacement parts, umd researchers are already proving the usefulness of 3-D printing in surgical rehearsal, drug testing and providing nearly instant custom medical equipment.

HOW BIOPRINTING WORKS

Living cells, possibly cultured from the patient to prevent rejection, are multiplied in the lab.

Cells are mixed in with substances like polymer gel to make living “ink” that’s loaded in a printer cartridge.

But for Sochol, this improvement over the petri dish can be improved upon even further with 3-D printing. Using the world’s highest-resolution printer, he can build models that closely mimic not just the functions but the tortuous shapes of microscopic structures in the liver, kidneys and elsewhere. More accurate shapes should produce more realistic results and greater drug safety, he says.

Sochol is also working with fellow Clark School researchers, including professors William Bentley and Kimberly Stroka, to help them incorporate 3-D printing into their experiments with models of the digestive system and the blood-brain barrier, respectively.

“To mimic the architecture of the body, the kind of nanoscale 3-D printing we have access to at Maryland is the only way to recreate these structures,” he says.

PRACTICE CU TS

MAGINE

YOU’RE

A

PA-

TIENT about to undergo surV I RT UAL O RGANS

RUG TESTING is slow, expensive and frustrating for patients desperate for effective new treatments. When it goes wrong, the results can be disastrous, even deadly. Part of the problem stems from traditional lab methods.

“Let’s say you’re testing a new drug and you put it in a petri dish with some cells,” says Ryan Sochol, assistant professor of mechanical engineering. “A petri dish is an incredibly inaccurate model of the human body.”

The biomedical movement known as “organ on a chip” aims for a more meticulous simulation by testing drug effects on cells grown inside the tiny rectangular channels of microfluidic chips. Delicate pumps circulate drugs and other fluids through the simulated organ structures, rather than simply mixing things up in a dish.

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A print head extrudes a cell-laden structure that hardens into a replacement body tissue.

Cell growth is nurtured in the newly printed part in preparation for implantation in the body.

gery to fix a complex heart abnormality, or the parent of conjoined twins whose tiny, intertwined organs doctors are about to separate.

Do you want this to be the surgeons’ first tangible exposure to the organs? Or would you rather the doctors be able to first hold accurate representations of the affected body parts, spin them around for closer examination, and even disassemble them to look inside?

Axel Krieger, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, specializes in 3-D printing of body structures for surgical rehearsal.

He spent several years in charge of 3-D printing at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., and is now researching the fabrication of more functional, more accurate models at umd.

“If the disease is really, really complex and very unique in terms of what surgeons en-

I L L U S T R AT I O N S BY R Y U M I S U N G

counter on a day-to-day basis, this can really give them a spatial understanding of where the disease is in reference to how they access it surgically,” he says.

The printed models have the potential to boost doctors’ confidence and improve communication between providers as they study and prepare for complicated surgeries, says Dr. Laura Olivieri, a pediatric cardiologist with whom Krieger has frequently worked.

“With these very rare heart defects that require very precise, individually tailored approaches, you want the people performing the surgery as informed as possible and armed with as much data as possible,” Olivieri says.

D EVICES ON D E MA ND

USING THE WORLD’S HIGHEST-RESOLUTION PRINTER, SOCHOL CAN BUILD MODELS THAT CLOSELY MIMIC NOT JUST THE FUNCTIONS BUT THE TORTUOUS SHAPES OF MICROSCOPIC STRUCTURES IN THE LIVER, KIDNEYS AND ELSEWHERE.

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P H O T O B Y J O H N T. C O N S O L I

A flexible, 3-Dprinted model of a child’s heart helped doctors at Children’s National Medical Center prepare for a complicated surgery.

HE RISE OF 3-D PRINTING will change the way medical equipment is manufactured and distributed, increasing convenience and affordability.

The technology has already made prosthetics more accessible. Even a basic hand or arm can cost upward of $10,000 and require multiple fitting visits to a specialist. Prosthetics can be impractical for children, who outgrow the devices in a few months, and for people who lack the cash or insurance coverage, or geographic access to a prosthetics lab.

But for less than $20 in material costs, it’s now possible to print out a custom-sized basic plastic hand that allows users to grasp objects.

It requires only a consumer-level 3-D printer, and the device doesn’t require a prosthetics specialist to put together.

Terrapin Works is working with the nonprofit Enabling the Future to provide free prosthetic hands to children, and umd engineering students are helping to improve the foundation’s downloadable designs and print files, says Maria Esquela, a volunteer with Enabling the Future.

“You send the file to print… and you’re hours away from having a custom prosthetic,” she says. “The speed, compared to traditional methods, is really precious to the youth receiving them, because they’re going to outgrow these before they need their next pair of shoes.”

Printing can also help create advanced, high-end prosthetics; the nonprofit is working on designs for a myolectric arm—one controlled by electrical signals generated by muscles—that will cost about $300 to make and offer similar functionality to devices that now cost $40,000.

Another advantage to the technology: It can encourage quick, inexpensive biomedical innovation and entrepreneurship, as a team of umd undergrads recently learned. When they needed an eeg headset for a portable system to detect Alzheimer’s disease in people without symptoms, they didn’t plunk down

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PRINTING

THE

FUTURE

Medical science and bioengineering are developing methods to replace diseased or damaged body tissues, organs and joints through 3-D printing. Here’s what a future case might look like:

0 1

Using CT scans and MRI, specialists make detailed images of the body part to be replaced—such as a diseased or injured lower jaw—as well as surrounding tissues.

0 2

0 3

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T E R P. U M D . E D U

With computer-aided design software, tissue engineers create digital files of the body part to be printed. Because the jaw could be misshapen or missing, they fill in blanks, fitting the new part to the patient’s unique anatomy.

The file is ready for 3-D printing, but first, the medical team must select from a variety of materials and technologies to create a living part of the patient’s body. In the case of a replacement mandible, that likely means several cell-laden gels (or bio-inks) must grow into various tissues.

The part is surgically placed in the body, either in a fully finished state or with cells still proliferating, to create the tissues of a fully restored jaw: bone, cartilage and connective tissue. In an even more futuristic twist, some researchers are studying in situ methods— printing structures directly into the body of a patient on an operating table.

I L L U S T R AT I O N / P H O T O C R E D I T

$10,000 at a medical supply shop. Instead, they downloaded a free file from the neurotechnology company Openbci.

The diy approach resulted in a brain-scanning tool that’s smaller and easier to carry to senior centers, as well as in about $8,500 in savings, says Dhruv Patel ’20, a leader of the Synapto team. It won first place and $20,000 in a National Institutes of Health biomedical design competition last summer.

“When we’re facing this kind of public health crisis, we need something that’s easily transported and easily manufactured,” Patel says.

P R I N T I NG THE BO DY

NE OF MEDICINE’S holy grails is wholesale replacement of body tissues and parts damaged by accident or disease. Known as tissue engineering, it has already seen limited success in the lab with the replacement and regeneration of relatively simple tissues in isolation, like skin, bone and cartilage.

The body isn’t simple, however, and to fulfill its promise, tissue engineering must be able to generate body parts in all their intricacy—with bones connected to tendons, blood vessels and nerves, or organs composed of many types of tissues.

For such a difficult assignment, 3-D printing is the tool of choice, says Fisher, who directs the National Institutes of Health-sponsored Center for Engineering Complex Tissues. Fisher is working with bioprinting, fabricating increasingly elaborate structures with cell populations growing inside them.

He’s collaborating with researchers at Rice University and the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, as well as with Dr. Curt Civin, director of the Center for Stem Cell Biology & Regenerative Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore.

It’s part of the MPowering the State partnership

P H O T O B Y J O H N T. C O N S O L I ; C O M P U T E R D E S I G N CO U RT ESY O F E N A B L I N G T H E F U T U R E

“THE PRINTING TECHNOLOGY IS VERY CAPABLE— IT’S ALREADY THERE. THAT’S ACTUALLY THE EASY PART. IT’S THE BIOLOGY THAT’S HARD.” JOH N FISH E R

to combine the strengths of umd and the University of Maryland, Baltimore.

“I can build things out of a single material and a single cell population and have control over exterior geometry and interior architecture, which is one step,” Fisher says. “The next step is that I start building things with multiple cell populations adjacent to one another in whatever position I would like. I start asking questions about how those populations interact based on their locations, which 3-D printing gives you the ability to do in a very precise way.”

While the reality of fabricating new body parts and organs is still years in the future, the concept is no longer limited to the sick bay in “Star Trek.”

“There are people in the field who’ve made suggestions that involve laying someone down on a table with a big printer above them and printing directly in the body,” Fisher says. “I think we’re a ways away from that … Right now we’re building model tissues to help us understand biology better. But something like that is the ultimate goal.” terp

—

Students in Terrapin Works turned a computer design file (above) into a 3-D-printed prosthetic hand (left).

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The protest encampment known as Resurrection City, built on the National Mall in 1968, was a last-ditch effort to draw attention to the plight of the poor. John Wiebenson (above right), a founding faculty member of the UMD School of 32 T E R P. U M D .played EDU Architecture, a key role in its design.

P H O TI LOL U CO URRA T TE ISOYN O Y ELDEI T E ST / PF HTOUTNON CE R

CITY OF HOPE P H OTO O F J O H N W I E B E N S O N CO U RT ESY O F A B I GA I L W I E B E N S O N

Fifty years ago, a UMD architecture professor helped bring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s last protest vision to life.

by Liam Farrell

he pilgrim protesters poured into Washington, D.C., from the farms of the South, the cities of the North, the mountains of Appalachia and the deserts of the West.

Carrying hammers, nails and pieces of plywood, America’s poor and forgotten met in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial 50 years ago this spring to build a new monument, albeit a temporary one.

Their shantytown, called Resurrection City, was meant to honor the final vision of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., assassinated just weeks earlier in Memphis, and to refocus the country’s conscience onto the plight of its most destitute.

It was a last gamble to become a lighthouse for a nation adrift on a sea of violence, from riots in urban centers to bombing campaigns in Southeast Asia.

But before the ceremonial first stake was driven into the National Mall with cries of “Freedom!,” King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (sclc) turned to the University of Maryland for help. Needing everything from a proper location for the camp to structural drawings and a site plan, organizers tapped a young architect named John Wiebenson to lead a committee on the project.

Wiebenson was a founding faculty member of the nascent umd School of Architecture. Opening in the fall of 1967, the school was infused with the tenor of the times, a sense of architecture as not just lines on a page or bricks and mortar, but a way of actually improving the lives of ordinary people. Now Wiebenson had an opportunity to put those ideals into practice.

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D

espite progress on desegregation and voting rights, King was increasingly disillusioned by early 1967.

Cities were still erupting into violence, black activists were questioning the efficacy of nonviolent resistance, and the Vietnam War was consuming the energy and resources once earmarked for a battle against debilitating poverty.

Allowing black people to sit at white lunch counters had been the easy part, King reasoned, as it required only a willingness to eliminate the worst behaviors of American society; true equality, he thought, was going to take something more.

Laden with notes, King rented a house in Jamaica without a telephone and outlined a more dramatic economic message, one advocating for not only wider employment but also a universal basic income.

“When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered,” King wrote in what became his final book, “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” “A civilization can flounder as readily in the face of moral and spiritual bankruptcy as it can through financial bankruptcy.”

The Poor People’s Campaign began to take shape following the Long Hot Summer of 1967, when violence broke out in more than 150 cities, most notably Detroit and Newark, N.J. King was attracted to an idea prof-

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fered by Marian Wright, a naacp lawyer in Mississippi, who advocated bringing poor people to Washington, D.C., and staging sit-ins at the Labor and Health, Education and Welfare departments.

“Very frankly, this is a search for an alternative to riots,” King told reporters on Dec. 1, 1967.

“This is kind of a last, desperate demand for the nation to respond to nonviolence.”

Following King’s death four months later, the sclc opted for a more dramatic approach: bringing the nation’s poor to Washington and housing them in a new shantytown that would be a visceral demonstration of America’s neglect.

It had some historical precedence. A mass of unemployed workers known as Coxey’s Army marched on Washington in 1894, and in 1932, the Bonus Army of 17,000 World War I veterans set up camp near the Anacostia River to spur long-awaited cash benefits for their service. And during the Great Depression, encampments called “Hoovervilles” built around the country became a symbol of need.

But the goal of this campaign, said Ralph Abernathy, King’s successor as head of the sclc, was to transform the economic structure of the entire country. He pledged that the Poor People’s Campaign would “plague the pharaohs of this nation with plague after plague until they agree to give us meaningful jobs and a guaranteed annual income.”

Now they had to figure out how to do it.

“The poor in Resurrection City have come to Washington to show that the poor in America are sick, dirty, disorganized and powerless— and they are criticized daily for being sick, dirty, disorganized and powerless.”

W R I T E R C A LV I N T R I L L I N I N T H E N E W Y O R K E R

W

iebenson, who went by “Wieb,” was a 36-year-old Colorado-born architect who had studied at Harvard, served in the Army Corps of Engineers and worked in San Francisco before being recruited in 1967 as one of the first faculty members of umd ’s new School of Architecture.

John Hill, the founding dean, was inspired by the social justice struggles of the 1960s and sought to build a school with that ethos.

Wiebenson, he says, was an early piece of that puzzle.

“He had all the right gifts,” Hill says. “I was looking for people who had that kind of vision, over and above their talents and interests in design. We wanted to be instrumental in the cause of addressing the needs of disadvantaged communities. (Resurrection City) exemplified the goals and values we all shared.”

Wiebenson was a dynamic force in the World War II-era building that initially housed the architecture school. A skillful teacher, he threaded the needle between losing his students in abstract concepts and redoing their work for them.

“He’s one of those people that had a moral gravitas that drew us all in,” says Mark McInturff ’72, a member of the first graduating architecture class who later worked with Wiebenson. “No one who was there in those first classes was untouched by him.”

Wiebenson was brought into the Poor People’s Campaign by architect Tunney Lee, and the pair joined James Goodell of Urban America and Kenneth

S K E TC H ES CO U RT ESY O F T U N N EY L E E

Jadin of Howard University in planning a city for thousands of protesters.

“John was clearly the leader of the group,” Lee says. “He was the most senior and most experienced.”

Faced with an uncertain number of “residents” who would need to build shelters quickly, the quartet first focused on identifying sites that would provide adequate size, facilities and symbolic resonance, and be close to government buildings, politicians and the media. The city’s central Mall was pinpointed as the best candidate among other possibilities such as the National Airport, D.C. Stadium and Gallaudet College.

“It was an exciting task,” Lee says. “Our part was small, but it was essential.”

With simple materials and abundant unskilled labor, the committee decided the town would be made up of prefabricated, triangular A-frame structures, with floor and roof panels on two-byfours. Wiebenson sketched out a plan where a “Main Street” would run down the center like a spine and contain core services of meeting spaces, child care and dining, with neighborhoods branching off the sides like ribs.

“Some of the most elegant gestures in architecture are the simplest,” says Roger K. Lewis, a umd architecture professor emeritus who was also among the founding faculty. “You couldn’t have done it any simpler or any better or any more economically.”

J

Preliminary sketches by Wiebenson highlighted the design committee’s effort to create simple construction plans and layout for Resurrection City, so it could be built quickly and function efficiently.

ust two days before the campaign began on May 12, 1968, the National Park Service issued a permit for 3,000 people to camp on 15 acres of West Potomac Park between the Reflecting Pool and Independence Avenue, from the Lincoln Memorial to 17th Street NW. With homes that could be put together in as little as 15 minutes, residents, activists and volunteers that included umd architecture students set about building Resurrection City.

The encampment was filled with a sense of pride and ownership in the early days. Residents painted their structures with designs and slogans, from “Motown” to “I Have Lived in Many Houses, This Is My First Home.” Some made custom doors or windows; others added second stories and sundecks. They described Resurrection City to reporters as “the city where you don’t pay taxes, where there’s no police brutality and you don’t go to jail.”

The prospects for such an effort, however, had weakened significantly during the 1960s. The federal government, increasingly estranged from the civil rights movement as King publicly criti-

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of U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, who many civil rights leaders had seen as the heir apparent for their cause. By the time the permit expired on June 24 and the camp was cleared, the ideals of economic justice had been eclipsed by tales of robbed tourists and skirmishes with police.

“The last days of Resurrection City were like being in the camp of a defeated army,” William Rutherford, executive director of the sclc, said in the 1990 documentary “Eyes on the Prize II: America at the Racial Crossroads, 1965–85.” “It was literally the end of a major battle, a battle of the poor, and they had lost.” cized the Vietnam War, had little interest in supporting thousands of protesters. Meanwhile, the fbi—long a sclc foe—mobilized to disrupt the campaign, from spreading rumors that participants would lose their welfare checks to seeding the movement with informants.

The campaign itself stagnated early, with few successful marches or demonstrations, while internal sclc battles for King’s mantle neutered the organization’s effectiveness. Though the expedition was cast as an alliance across races, most of the Mexican-American and Native American contingents stayed in other parts of D.C. and did little to coordinate with Resurrection City, while sclc leaders attracted negative attention for lodging in a motel rather than the shantytown. Used to sympathetic media coverage, activists were instead met with harsh scrutiny from reporters harassed by the camp’s internal security; their ar-

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ticles regularly focused on rampant t h e f t a n d crime rather than the campaign’s purpose.

“The poor in Resurrection City have come to Washington to show that the poor in America are sick, dirty, disorganized and powerless—and they are criticized daily for being sick, dirty, disorganized and powerless,” wrote Calvin Trillin in The New Yorker.

Mother Nature herself became an adversary, as it rained 11 of Resurrection City’s first 19 days, and 22 of its 43-day lifespan. The campsite became a quagmire, with muddy furrows and several inches of standing water overwhelming the wooden planks hastily put down as walkways alongside the huts.

Whatever momentum may have remained dissipated in early June with the assassination

R TOP: The Rev. Ralph Abernathy, center, hammers the first shelter together for Resurrection City.

Abernathy took over for the recently assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. and struggled to keep the movement unified amidst the difficulties of the Poor People’s Campaign.

LOWER PHOTO: After building their new homes on the National Mall, many residents of Resurrection City spray-painted slogans and hometowns on their shelters.

eflecting on the experience the following year, Wiebenson was unconvinced that the failures of Resurrection City were unique in American life. His article for the November 1969 edition of the Journal of the American Institute of Planners contends that Resurrection City’s downfall was due to how quickly it mimicked the society around it, from a lack of participatory governance to insufficient responses to changing needs.

“Fences and fear, withdrawal and despair describe ghetto, suburb and downtown apartment building alike,” he wrote. “Resurrection City had, in a matter of weeks, become a demonstration model of the current American community.”

TO P P H OTO B E T T M A M N /G E T T Y; LOW E R P H OTO CO U RT ESY O F T U N N EY L E E

I LHLOUTSOT RPAATUI LO NS /EPQHUOETI R P O AC /R EGDE ITTT Y

Coretta Scott King walks through Resurrection City with Abernathy (in blue shirt). In the wake of her husband’s murder, King helped rally some of the biggest marches and protests of W I N T E R Campaign.

2018 37 the Poor People’s

For the rest of his life, Wiebenson tried his best to correct that.

He was a gadfly on the local architecture scene, leaving umd in the early 1970s to start a private practice and becoming an early activist for preservation, leading the effort to save the Old Post Office building on Pennsylvania Avenue.

In addition to commercial work, his firm regularly did pro bono projects for local charities.

Endlessly whimsical, Wiebenson drew comics featuring a horse (“Archihorse”) advocating for historic architecture, took his colleagues on meandering walks in the alleyways of D.C. and threw seeds into vacant lots.

Wiebenson proposed to his wife, Abigail, after seeing her just five times (“Not only was he a man of clear principle,” she says, “I knew I would never be bored.”) and turned their Dupont Circle rowhome into an urban treehouse of open air, natural light and secret compartments. On Fridays, he would pick up comic books, steaks and baked potatoes for “Wild Man Night,” when the couple’s three sons would search the house for the hidden comics and then feast on dinner without using any utensils.

His death in September 2003, while spending a Sunday morning visiting a job site for Martha’s Table, a D.C. charity, was a tragic tribute to how he lived his life.

While investigating a shaft that once had been used as a dumping place for oil, Wiebenson was overwhelmed by the poor ventilation and lack of oxygen, and died.

Lewis, who is also a longtime D.C. architecture columnist for The Washington Post, says Wie-

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The weather proved to be one of the most difficult obstacles for Resurrection City. An unusual amount of rain turned the campsite into a muddy mess that sapped the spirits of protesters.

benson was the “emblem of the architect who devotes his life and career to public service.”

After her husband’s death, Abigail says, homeless people occasionally stopped by the house to offer their condolences. Wiebenson had unfailingly talked to them every day on his way to work, she says, and gave them his spare change.

T

he poor people’s campaign is largely remembered as a hubristic overreach, the Waterloo of the civil rights movement.

All of the conditions that had made the 1963 March on Washington a success—from the powerful presence of King to a society not yet consumed by Vietnam— had collapsed by the time a grieving band of activists undertook one of the most radical protests in American history.

“The Washington campaign was turned into almost a perfect failure: It was poorly timed, poorly organized and poorly led,” wrote historian Gerald McKnight. “By allowing itself to become bogged down in running a city, sclc surrendered all its best protest weapons: imagination, spontaneity and élan.”

The complex legacy of Resurrection City lives on in more recent encamped protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street and Standing Rock, which dramatized issues of income inequality and pollution. Wiebenson wryly noted in his Resurrection City article how an area of so much protest and controversy could be “returned to its parklike character, a place of grass and trees and flags, a place for monuments and memorials”—an observation no less relevant 42 years later for Oc-

cupy’s Zuccotti Park camp in New York City.

Wiebenson, however, never believed history could be erased.

There’s a building on Connecticut Avenue in Northwest D.C., between Q and R streets, that houses a Loft women’s clothing store.

When Wiebenson was working on it in the early 2000s for a commercial developer, he discovered that a former carriage house used to stand at that location, and decided to pay homage to a part of D.C.’s past.

In the alley behind the store, above jet-black doors on graffitied brick walls, stands today a charming motif of horse head sculptures. It’s his small way of reminding passersby that history— even if it’s hardly remembered today—is worth fighting for and building on, even in the smallest of ways. terp

A umd class connected 1968 Washington, D.C., to its past and present through the architectural history of the U Street neighborhood. Read more at terp.umd.edu.

P H OTO PAU L S EQ U E I R A / G E T T Y

CLICK out of your comfort zone.

bold step in your career.

Create a unique Terp connection.

Take a

Through the Terrapins Connect program, alumni can guide the next generation of Terp leaders, get invaluable career advice or expand their professional networks.

It’s flexible, fun and free!

Get connected as a mentor or a mentee at

TERRAPINSCONNECT.UMD.EDU.

ALUMNI

A S S O C I AT I O N

STAY ACTIVE

Letter From the Executive Director

Leaders Among Us

Conference Brings Together Alumni Volunteers THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND ALUMNI ASSOCIATION honored the Latino Alumni

WHEN YOU STEPPED on

Network as the 2017 Network of the Year for its work creating programs for alumni and

campus your first day at

building Terp pride.

Maryland, you instantly became part of an alumni

The Network Awards, part of the Alumni Association’s 2017 Leadership Conference,

network now 361,000 strong. Your life experiences will

honored volunteers from across the nation who help lead regional, affinity and academic

continue to grow—marriage, children, jobs—but you are

networks. Nearly 100 volunteers from 30 networks traveled to the Samuel Riggs IV Alum-

always part of the Terp network.

ni Center Oct. 26–27 for interactive sessions and celebrations of Terp pride leading up to

One of the greatest benefits of being a Terp is being part of this powerful, professional network that

the Homecoming football game.

“Leadership is one of the most integral components to the University of Maryland’s

provides opportunities for alumni to advance their

success,” said Amy Eichhorst, Alumni Association executive director. “It is because of

careers. Your fellow alumni live in every state and

volunteers’ unwavering leadership and dedication that we are able to engage alumni in

dozens of countries. They are leaders in Congress and

over 500 events each year nationwide.”

in statehouses. Industry executives. Teachers, coaches and nonprofit leaders.

Are you tapping into your alumni network and benefitting from the resources offered by the University of Maryland Alumni Association?

Through our online platform Terrapins Connect, you can link up with other alumni based on profession, background or interest—and you can enter into a for-

The networks develop programs to keep alumni connected to the university. Volunteers at the conference learned about topics including event engagement, board management and the fearless ideas that will propel Maryland forward.

“It was interesting to see how we all—regional, academic and affinity network leaders— have similar challenges,” said Gerson Elias ’12, president of the Latino Alumni Network.

“Being able to talk about ways to overcome those challenges and how we can collaborate and help each other was valuable.”

His network’s mission is to serve as a representative voice for Latino alumni and sup-

mal mentorship. Our free webinar series offers advice

port their professional, social and developmental interests. In the last year, it has orga-

ranging from resume writing to retirement planning to

nized events for alumni ranging from social brunches to the Latinx Leadership Summit, a

leadership communication.

collaboration with student groups, the Office of Multicultural Involvement and Community

Small, industry-focused Terp Professional Network (TPN ) events around the country provide alumni

Advocacy and university leaders.

“A lot of the events that we’ve had are geared toward reaching out to students and

with an opportunity to network while hearing from

connecting with them so they can see successful alumni as role models and use them as

business leaders in their professions, and the Career

a resource,” Elias says.

Center job board provides alumni with concrete leads

— Daryl Lee Hale, Alumni Association staff

on open positions.

If you’re not in the job market but would like to help fellow Terps, consider serving as a mentor through Terrapins Connect; offering an externship to a current student; speaking at a TPN event; or simply posting a job opening at your organization on the student or alumni job board.

Congratulations on being part of this powerful network for life!

Amy Eichhorst

Executive Director University of Maryland Alumni Association

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T E R P. U M D . E D U

To get involved with a region, affinity or academic network, visit alumni.umd.edu/find-network or contact your network’s representative at alumni@umd.edu.

E VENTS

Master of Tailgates bill van dyke ’79 has attended every Terps home football game and nearly every men’s basketball home game since ’71—even pedaling his bicycle as a teen from his family’s home in New Carrollton, Md. Long married to his Terp sweetBill Van Dyke (second from left) tailgates with friends Dan Dering ‘78, heart, Barbara ’78, the father of two Tim Meinhardt ‘79, Rich Rhoda and Andy Miller ‘79.

Maryland alumnae and owner of Paradigm Mortgage in Bethesda these days drives to games, where he is a master tailgater.

“I never really left,” says Van Dyke, a lifetime member of the University of Maryland Alumni Association. “It’s all I’ve ever known.”

As a student, he was in Theta Chi Fraternity and upon graduation 37 years ago he created its football tailgates—225 and counting. The menus of the once beer-only assemblies have evolved to feature grilled steak and shrimp.

Later, he started hosting basketball tailgates, now held in the Terrapin Trail Garage next to the Xfinity Center for family, fraternity brothers and many other friends. He estimates he’s presided over 200 to 300 of those.

The Alumni Association hosts dozHe even remembers his first Maryland basketball game, when he was in ens of athletics-themed events every high school: “Maryland beat South Carolina, the No. 1 team. Bob Bodell steals year. Find a game watch or tailgate near you at alumni.umd. the ball, throws it to Jim O’Brien, and O’Brien just swishes it in.”

DO GOOD SERVICE MONTH Terps are bold, innovative, smart—and generous. Every April, alumni from coast to coast unite to do good in their communities, and you’re invited to take part in the action.

Last year, nearly 500 Terps participated in 15 events across the country on issues including food insecurity, homelessness, river pollution and refugees.

To organize a Do Good Service Month project with alumni in your area, contact your regional representative by visiting alumni@umd.edu.

edu/events.

— Tony Glaros

STAY CONNECTED

HOMECOMING TAILGATE, OCT. 28 Terps geared up for the Homecoming football game at the Alumni Association’s annual tailgate at the Samuel Riggs IV Alumni Center. The popular event featured a winery, several Terp-owned breweries and well over 1,000 Maryland alumni and friends.

GOLDEN TERPS HOMECOMING BRUNCH, OCT. 28 Roy Eskow ‘68, M.A. ‘71 and Julie Eskow enjoy brunch with fellow members of the Class of 1968 and prior at the Riggs Alumni Center.

LIFETIME MEMBER WALL UNVEILING, OCT. 28 Jonathan Rolf M.A. ‘91, MBA ‘95 celebrates the unveiling of his brother’s name, Daniel Rolf ‘99, M.S. ‘06, of Colorado, on the Frann G. & Eric S. Francis Lifetime Member Wall. He’s joined by his wife, Sarah, and son and current Terp, David.

The Samuel Riggs IV Alumni Center is the perfect venue for your next event. Seven unique spaces can accommodate events of 10 to 1,000 people. Alumni Association members receive special rates.

book your next event at riggs.umd.edu.

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ALUMNI

PROFILES

CHERI BUSTOS ’83

The Cheri Bustos File Her political education started early: Bustos’ grandfather was a farmer and a state legislator, and her father was a newspaper reporter who later became an aide to Illinois congressmen and senators. “I was around it my whole life,” she says.

Before running for office and working in health care communications, Bustos spent almost two decades as a reporter and editor for The Quad-City Times, U.S. REP. CHERI BUSTOS ’83

was a rare

interviewing everyone from gang members

beacon of success for Democrats in the 2016

to presidential candidates. “It’s a great

elections. Though her northwestern Illinois

foundation (for politics),” she says. “I’m

district went for President Donald Trump,

comfortable around people in all different

Bustos coasted to a third term by more than

settings. I try very hard to listen more than

20 points.

I talk.”

As her party looks to win back small-town and rural voters, Bustos is leading the party’s “heartland engagement” and getting noticed

through a series of job-shadowing

on the national stage, with Politico maga-

events called “Cheri on Shift” and “Super-

zine calling her a potential “secret weapon”

market Saturdays,” where she asks shoppers

for Democrats. She spoke to Terp about

about their concerns. She had a sense that

her background and message for the 2018

2016 wasn’t going to go her party’s way. “I

congressional elections.—LF

knew we were missing the mark.”

Bustos was drawn to UMD while interning with the Democratic Senatorial

42

Bustos takes the pulse of her district

Her prescription for the midterms is getting back to economic messaging

Campaign Committee. “It was a steady

and speaking to people who’ve been left

stream of just being around wonderful

behind. “When (Trump) talked about bringing

professors,” she says. “I was able to have a

jobs home, that resonated in districts like

tremendous education there on government

mine,” she says. “We stand for five things:

and politics.”

jobs, jobs, education, jobs and jobs.”

T E R P. U M D . E D U

Fine-Tuned for Success

Alum Engineers Winning Race Cars for Kurt Busch

A P P H O T O / T H E D I S PAT C H , T O D D W E VA E R T

MIKE COOK ’08

“Most of the speed of a race car comes from the shop. The difference between being good and great is such a fine line.”

MIKE COOK

mike cook ’08 was nearing the finish line on a math degree at umd when the Terps Racing team sent him on a detour.

The son of a Maryland waterman who repaired boats and motorcycles, Cook had drag and road racing experience but had poured most of his youthful energy into playing music. One day on his way back from a umd library, he came across the club that designs, builds and races a Formula-style race car, and it changed his path.

I L L U S T R AT I O N BY G A B R I E L A H E R N A N D E Z

He joined, and later led, the student group and switched his major to mechanical engineering.

“It took me awhile to find my way,” he says, “but once I did, it lit a fire under me.”

Cook is now an engineer with Kurt Busch, the No. 41 car driver for Stewart-Haas Racing in nascar and defending Daytona 500 champion.

“The sport is so complex and specialized,” says Cook, who interned with Dale Earnhardt Inc. and did automotive testing at Aberdeen

Proving Ground in Maryland before coming to Stewart-Haas in 2014. “Even with all my experience, I feel like I’m still getting up to speed.”

Preparing for a nascar race, he says, is like starting a new college course each week and having a final exam on Sunday. Cook, based in North Carolina, is the crew’s second engineer and handles activities ranging from fuel mileage to data analysis and dashboard configurations. He spends the beginning of each week coming up with specifications, testing tires and air pressure, setting up cockpit controls and researching previous races. At each racetrack, Cook helps with practice and qualifying rounds, and sees the difference between what works in a wind tunnel but not outdoors, where a gust of wind or warm day can add precious time.

“Most of the speed of a race car comes from the shop,” Cook says. “The difference between being good and great is such a fine line.”

Before the 2017 nascar season, Busch switched manufacturers from Chevrolet to Ford, necessitating an overhaul of everything from the car body to the engine and suspension. The work paid off immediately, as Busch won February 2017’s Daytona 500, the most iconic race in the sport.

Cook says the key to that victory was having slightly better mileage and fuel capacity, so when the leading driver ran out of gas on the last lap, Busch was able to take the checkered flag.

“The only lap we led was the last lap,” Cook says. “That’s the one you want.”—lf

WINTER 2018

43

CLASS NOTES

ALUMNI

PROFILES

B R I A N L AV I N ’ 0 9

TIAN LI M.S. ’15, PH.D. ’16

was named to Forbes magazine’s 2018 “30 Under 30” lists, recognizing young people revolutionizing 20 industries. She made the Energy list for contributing to the creation of see-through wood at UMD. Read about the other four Terps recognized by Forbes at terp.umd.edu/classnotes.

MAX JAFFE ’13 ran the 2017

New York City Marathon in November to raise money for the Live Your Cor Foundation, created to honor his friend Cory Hubbard ’14, who was killed by a hit-and-run driver in College Park in 2014. Jaffe is director of strategic partnerships for CBS New York.

REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS ’09 was admitted to the Con-

necticut state bar following his graduation from Yale Law School. After being convicted of carjacking at age 16, he served eight years in prison, then graduated from UMD

and earned a Harvard University fel-

lowship, writing two critically acclaimed poetry books and a memoir along the way.

He is pursuing a doctorate in law at Yale.

Retired Army Capt. FLO GROBERG ’06 co-wrote with

Tom Sileo the new book “8 Seconds of Courage: A Soldier’s Story from Immigrant to the Medal of Honor,” chronicling his life, including immigrating to the

Bringing Rome Home

Alum Finds National Acclaim With Baltimore Restaurant

U.S. from France, attending UMD, enlisting in the Army and receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor after tackling a suicide bomber in Afghanistan to save the lives of fellow soldiers.

44

T E R P. U M D . E D U

semesters abroad are the stuff of wistful memories, fodder for stories of carefree evenings strolling the banks of the Seine or days climbing Machu Picchu. Brian Lavin’s

semester in Rome gave him much more than that: It set him on a career path.

Lavin ’09 had worked in restaurants throughout high school and college, but it was Europe’s food culture that gave him the idea of opening his own, focusing on local, fresh, seasonal food and cultivating a homey, intimate atmosphere. “There are tons of little, tiny places all throughout Rome as opposed to huge, 250-seat restaurants,” Lavin says. “I’ve tried to bring that style of dining here.”

Thus was born Gnocco, the 34-seat restaurant that chef Lavin opened in 2016 with Sam

I L L U S T R AT I O N S BY G A B R I E L A H E R N A N D E Z

FLIP YOUR LID existing sports bar. “There were, like, 100 TVs in here. It was pretty dingy,” he says.

With its wood tables and low lighting, Gnocco’s vibe is now more cozy than seedy, befitting its name, which means “dumpling” in Italian but is also a term of endearment often used for children.

Lavin’s umd major in operations management has helped him navigate the non-edible aspects of restaurant ownership. “A lot of people who work in restaurants don’t think they have to go to college or get a degree, but it really was invaluable,” he says.

Tip your hat to the Terps this season. Shop the UMD Bookstore and online for new ball caps and other Maryland pride gear.

shopterp.com

“We in no way wanted to be pretentious. We just want to make people feel comfortable— feel like they’re at home.”

B R I A N L AV I N

White ’09—they met while studying abroad— in a corner rowhouse in Highlandtown, a transitioning neighborhood in Baltimore. Its success recently landed him a spot on Zagat’s inaugural national “30 Under 30” list, highlighting the country’s most promising young talent in the restaurant industry.

His path to Gnocco took him through chef positions at Salt, then at Fork & Wrench, two Baltimore restaurants, before settling on the space for his new venture. He “drove past once a week for the past three years” as he mulled the owners’ offer for him to transform the

P H O T O B Y J O H N T. C O N S O L I

But it’s the Mediterranean-inspired food that has won Lavin acclaim. “Make your reservations now; Gnocco is on track to become one of Baltimore’s hottest restaurants,” wrote critic Suzanne Loudermilk in The Baltimore Sun last year, adding that she was “still salivating over the grilled Spanish octopus set amid a shaved fennel salad, a garlicky ajo blanco sauce and sweet grapes.”

Despite the public praise, Lavin hopes to keep Gnocco accessible and down to earth.

“Before, this was a neighborhood bar, and we didn’t want to alienate anybody from coming here,” he says. Though the restaurant serves rabbit, veal sweetbreads and blood sausage on its frequently changing menu, Lavin hopes some guests will simply “come and sit at the bar and have a glass of wine and a pasta dish and get out for $20.”

“We in no way wanted to be pretentious,” he says. “We just want to make people feel comfortable—feel like they’re at home.”—sl

45

ALUMNI

FROM THE ARCHIVES

Tale From the Trail t 80 years old, the Terrapin Trail Club is the oldest student-run organization on campus—but it’s certainly not slowing down. Back in its debut season (below), students paused during a hike in Devil’s Den Nature Preserve in Virginia. Today, the club offers a year-round calendar of outdoor activities such as hiking, biking, backpacking, camping,

46

T E R P. U M D . E D U

skiing, caving, canoeing, kayaking, skydiving and rock climbing.

More than 250 students are active members, says President Harlie Petrangelo ’18. “If you want to lead a trip that you don’t see being offered, you can start a trip of your own. That’s what makes the club so unique—it’s shaped by its members.”

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