Research

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december 2015 | vol. 9, no. 6

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It’s part of the MPowering the State initiative to promote collaboration between the universities and create synergy in areas including bioinformatics, personalized medicine and public health informatics. “Our educators and re-searchers have developed deep collaborations focused on improving the quality of life and health in the state of Maryland,” Provost Mary Ann Rankin says. “The projects funded through this MPower program serve as catalysts for major research initiatives that could lead to lifesaving discoveries and groundbreaking health care innovations.”

The program has distributed $11.5 million to 132 research-ers since its launch in 2008. Projects funded by the 2015 awards are:

• Development of an Implantable Device to Determine Cancer Cell Response to Chemotherapy in Real Time

Elizabeth Smela of the Department of Mechanical Engineering is working with John Basile of University of Maryland School of Dentistry to develop an im-plantable device to isolate and contain cancer cells to measure their response to chemotherapy drugs. While conventional cancer treatments can be ine�ective and

toxic to normal tissues, information from the new device would advance personalized medicine by monitoring how a patient’s tumor cells respond to specific treatment regimens as well as speed drug development.

• A Non-Invasive and Cost-Effective Approach for Lung Cancer Screening Early detection by a CT scan improves survival rates for lung cancer, the No. 1 cancer killer in the United States, but the scans turn up many false positive results.

Jiuzhou “John” Song of the Department of Animal and Avian Sciences and Feng Jiang of the University of Maryland School of Medicine are developing biomarkers in saliva that can be used to accurately and noninvasively diagnose lung cancer after a CT scan finds suspi-cious nodules.

• Visualization-Assisted Clustering to Detect Diverse Patterns of Disease Progression in Parkinson’s Disease About a million people in the United States and 10 mil-lion worldwide have Parkinson’s disease. The diversity in how Parkinson’s a�ects patients makes identification of subtypes di�cult and hampers research. Amitabh Varshney of the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and Lisa Shulman of the University of Maryland School of Medicine will use cutting-edge visual data mining and clustering to iden-tify subtypes among a 2,000-patient dataset, allow-ing them to detect patterns in the symptoms and the progression of the disease.

• Nanotopographic Diagnostic Panel for Breast Cancer

Metastasis Wolfgang Losert of the Department of Physics, John Fourkas of the Department of Chemistry and Biochem-istry and Stuart Martin of the University of Maryland School of Medicine will examine how both normal and cancerous cells extracted from breast cancer patients respond to di�erent surface textures. Using unique manufacturing capabilities to create a range of textures along with advanced imaging and analysis of cell move-ment, the project will define cell behaviors that carry a higher probability of cancer metastasis.

A new funding program will help UMD researchers connect with collaborators from international partner universities, bringing together scientists and scholars with diverse backgrounds and expertise to address im-portant issues.

The Joint Research Workshops program will grow UMD’s international research portfolio and raise the university’s profile.

“Our strong emphasis on joint international research collaborations will maximize our global impact and expand our partners net-work, both essential strategic components for our model 21st century research university,” says Vice President and Chief Research Officer Patrick O’Shea.

Three partnerships are active so far:

São Paolo Research Foundation: UMD signed an agreement with the foundation this year to facili-

tate scientific and technological collabora-tion between researchers from UMD and a university in São Paulo, Brazil, by funding joint research workshops.

Tel Aviv University: Two teams of faculty and graduate students from UMD and Tel Aviv University were

awarded $15,000 for joint research work-shops in 2015, with a 2016 round coming up.

University of Ulster: UMD and the University of Ulster earlier this year announced a new program to sup-

port joint scientific research by funding joint research workshops in 2016.

For more information or to view calls for proposals, visit http://go.umd.edu/o5s.

UMD-UMB Seed Grants Focus on Fighting Cancer and Parkinson’s

International Workshops in Your Future?

Researchers from the University of Maryland, College Park and the University of Maryland, Baltimore will combine e�orts to develop lifesaving treatments and methods to help cancer and Parkinson’s disease patients, thanks to the latest round of awards from the Joint Research and Innovation Seed Grant Program.

Elizabeth Smela

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ER UPDATE FROM THE OFFICE

OF FEDERAL RELATIONS

Budget Bill Heads off Sequestration Cuts

The Bipartisan Budget Act that President Obama signed in November provides relief from the sequester-level discretionary spending caps and avoids the harmful effects of a year-long continu ing resolution (CR). The CR would have held fund-ing for education, research and other priorities stagnant and deepened federal budget uncertainty. Instead, the new budget act boosts both defense and non-defense spending by $25 billion each in 2016 and $15 billion each in 2017. The next step is for Congress to enact appropriations bills this year and next to increase federal investments in the vital areas of higher education and scientific research, helping to keep the United States at the forefront of global research and innovation.

Look to the Federal Corner for information on higher education and the federal government. If you have a specific topic you’d like to see discussed, contact Ross Stern, director of state government relations, at stern@umd.edu.

Faculty and leaders from across campus recently met to recognize colleagues for their research in the past year and present the inaugural Research Com-municator Impact Awards. Among the attendees (clockwise from upper left): Distin guished Univer-sity Professor Ben Shneiderman, President Wallace Loh, Assistant Dean Rebecca Ratner, Senior Research Scholar Nancy Gal lagher, Professor Karen Lips, Vice President and Chief Research O�cer Patrick O’Shea, Provost Mary Ann Rankin, Associate Professor Yuxing Li, Distinguished University Professor Rita Colwell and Professor Amitabh Varshney.

Research Communications Celebrated

Jiuzhou “John” Song

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SPOTLIGHT

The Division of Research publishes research@maryland several times per semester. Its goal is to better inform and connect the research community at the University of Maryland. Your comments and suggestions are welcome. Please email them to Tara Burke, Director, Research Development Resources, at tburke13@umd.edu.

Produced by University Publications for the Division of Research Patrick G. O’Shea, vice president and chief research officer

Executive editor: Tara BurkeManaging editor: Chris CarrollArt director: Jennifer Paul

research@maryland the of

Office of the Vice President for Research2133 Lee BuildingUniversity of MarylandCollege Park, MD 20742-5121 www.umresearch.umd.edu

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Research ≤aryland@

IN THIS ISSUE:

UMD-UMB Seed Grants Focus on Fighting Cancer, Parkinson’s

International Joint Research Opportunities on the Rise

Inaugural Research Communicator Impact Award Winners Honored

FA C U LT Y AWARDS & HONORS

Gregory Baecher, a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, recieved the 2015 GEOSNet Distinguished Award for LIFETIME ACHIEVE-MENT. He was recognized for substantial contributions to the geotechnical risk and reliability community in research, education and leadership.

Steve Fetter, a professor in the School of Public Policy, has joined the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy as the principal assistant director for national security and international affairs. He served as the office’s assistant director at large from 2009–12. Fetter is on leave through January 2017.

Sacoby Wilson, assistant professor in the School of Public Health, recieved the Damu Smith Environmental Achievement Award from the American Public Health Association. Sacoby, an expert in exposure science and air pollution monitoring, was honored for his leadership in environmental and social justice.

Bobby Benedicto is an assistant professor in the Department of Women’s Studies. He researches and teaches at the intersections of queer theory, postcolonial theory and urban anthropology.

Kathleen Stewart is an associate professor in the Department of Geographical Sciences. She works in the area of geographic information science with a particular interest in temporal GIS.

Nathan Swenson is an associate professor in the Department of Biology. Swenson conducts inte-grative plant ecology and evolution research with a focus on the tropics.

Huan Xu is an assistant professor of aerospace en-gineering with a joint appointment in the Institute for Systems Research. She researches control and dynamical systems and formal methods.

N E W F A C U L T YWe introduce you to new faculty and research

scientists in the Maryland research community.

ARTS AND HUMANITIES DEAN’S LECTURE SERIES

African singer-songwriter and activist Angélique Kidjo in conversation with Associate Dean Sheri ParksFriday, Dec. 4, 2015, 5:30 p.m.Gildenhorn Recital Hall Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center Free tickets: http://go.umd.edu/oxd

DARPA SEMINAR

Arati Prabhakar, director, DARPAWednesday, Dec. 16, noon to 1 p.m.2460 A.V. Williams Building

RSVP: http://goo.gl/forms/TUqcl9uFuJ

U P CO M I N G EVENTS & CO N F E R E N C E S

@ U M D R E S E A R C H

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has funded a three-year experiment to analyze faculty workload in STEM and social sciences departments throughout the University of Maryland System to determine if work is being distributed fairly.

KerryAnn O’Meara, primary investigator for the grant, says past NSF-funded research shows women and underrepresented minorities often do more campus service and advising than other faculty of similar discipline and rank. As a result, they’re unhappy with the amount of time left for research.

Workload dissatisfaction is one of the main rea-sons for faculty departures, says O’Meara, a pro-fessor of higher education and director of UMD’s ADVANCE program, which supports research and scholarship by women at the university.

The project will establish computerized “dash-boards” that faculty and administrators can

view to monitor balances of teaching, service and research and potentially use to distribute work equitably. UMD’s grant also funds similar research in the Massachusetts and North Carolina state systems.

Workload transparency brings a wide range of benefits, from greater equity within depart-ments to a better idea of what the universities contribute to their states, O’Meara says.

“This is a way to increase fairness, so women and underrepresented faculty aren’t doing more service than everybody else,” she says. “It also allows us to create efficiencies by ex-amining total activity to see if there are things we don’t need to be doing. And it gives us a way to describe to the public and legislators what we’re doing as a university and why.”

KerryAnn O’Meara

NSF ADVANCE Award Targets Workload Equity, Transparency

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