COLLEGE PARK, Md. – Climate change is already resulting in increases in the number and strength of extreme weather and climate events such as heat waves, droughts and flooding. Now a new UMD-led study finds that in tropical regions of the globe exposure to extremes of heat and precipitation during prenatal and early childhood years could make it harder for children to attain secondary school education, even when they live in better-off households.

University of Maryland researcher Heather Randell, lead author of the study, and co-author Clark Gray, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, found that climatic conditions can adversely affect education attainment in tropical countries in multiple ways. In Southeast Asia—a region that historically has high heat and humidity—exposure to higher-than-average temperatures during prenatal and early childhood has a harmful effect on schooling and is associated with fewer years of attending school.  In West and Central Africa, and Southeast Asia, lower rainfall in early life is associated with lower levels of education. And in Central America and the Caribbean, children who experienced higher than typical rainfall had the lowest predicted education.

“If climate change undermines educational attainment, this may have a compounding effect on underdevelopment that over time magnifies the direct impacts of climate change,” the authors write in the study, which was published in the April 15, 2019, issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).  “As the effects of climate change intensify, children in the tropics will face additional barriers to education.”

Randell conducted the synthesis study as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Maryland's National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center in Annapolis. She and Gray investigated the links between extreme temperature and precipitation in early life and educational attainment in 29 countries in the global tropics. These results suggest an additional way climate change could undermine gains in socioeconomic development, particularly among the world’s most vulnerable populations; and the researchers say their work has implications for determining vulnerability to climate change and development trajectories.

“While these results may not be directly related to schools, they are important factors in early life that affect a kid’s school trajectory,” said Randell. “People rarely think about how kids’ education is directly linked to climate. But this is really important given the extent that climate change is impacting extreme weather events.

Although the authors expected that children from better educated households would fare better, they found instead that, even for better-off households in the tropics, climate change could erode development and education gains.

Randell explained that as children in the tropics feel the intensifying effects of climate change, they will face additional barriers to education and this is more evidence of the varied social impacts of climate change. Policies to safeguard children in these exposed populations, for example making sure pregnant women and young children can get relief from high heat and humidity, or providing heat or drought tolerant crop varieties, could limit long term impacts of climate change.

Randell and Gray’s PNAS paper builds on their earlier study published in 2016 in Global Environmental Change that found how climate variability competes with schooling in Ethiopia and could lower adaptive capacity for generations.

College Park, Md. – Two University of Maryland scholars—a literary scholar and a computer scientist— have been named 2019 Guggenheim Fellows, chosen on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise.

Mohammad T. Hajiaghayi, the Jack and Rita G. Minker Professor of Computer Science, and Gerard Passannante, associate professor of English, were among the 168 scholars, artists and writers chosen this year from a group of almost 3,000 applicants. They join a long list of past UMD Guggenheim Fellows that includes groundbreaking historian of slavery Ira Berlin, a Distinguished University Professor; physicist Michael E. Fisher, a Distinguished University Professor and Regents Professor who received two Guggenheim Fellowships (1970 & 1979);  professor of theatre Heather S. Nathans; quantum chemist, Millard Alexander, a Distinguished University Professor; and engineer/physicist Katepalli Sreenivasan.

Awarded by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the fellowships are primarily awarded to those in the creative arts and humanities. These awards recognize those “who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts," and provide grants of six to 12 months so recipients can freely pursue their work.

Hajiaghayi is one of 132019 awardees whose work is based in the natural sciences. He will receive $50,000 over 12 months to continue his research on algorithms for big graphs and game theory. Hajiaghayi’s algorithms—which are used by companies like Google and Amazon—analyze data sets with trillions of connections while accounting for user objectives and incentives.

“I want to keep working on solving real-world problems essentially,” Hajiaghayi says. “These technology companies will help me do that because they have huge datasets that you can’t find anywhere else.”

His algorithms also help process large datasets on devices with a limited amount of fast memory—a smartphone or tablet, for example—or devices that are connected to a relatively slow external data source. 

In 2016 Hajiaghayi was a part of a team of computer scientists from the University of Maryland, Stanford University and Microsoft Research that was the first to solve a game theory scenario known as “Colonel Blotto” that had vexed researchers for nearly a century.

Passannante studies European literature and culture from the 14th to the 18th century—from the verses of the poet Petrarch to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. He is especially interested in how ideas travel. His recent honors include both the new Guggenheim Fellowship and an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship to support his research on how contemporary ideas about scale, or the relative size or extent of something, have roots in ancient and early modern arguments about the order of the universe. In his project, "God is in the Detail," Passannante will explore a variety of literary and philosophical discussions of scale—for example, ancient arguments about cosmic order, Hamlet’s musings on infinity,  the discovery of calculus and the bodies of insects as seen through a microscope.

"It's about the history of the strategies we have for confirming that the world is secure and orderly—that 'everything’s fine'—in spite of what experience might say to the contrary," says Passannante. "It’s about finding evidence of order in the very smallest of things."

The phrase "God is in the detail" suggests that the divine is evident in even the smallest of things. Passannante chose it as the title of his project because it speaks to how questions of scale are caught up in questions about the order of the universe. He sees similar patterns emerging in contemporary thought, especially discussions of global warming.

"We live in a moment of profound ecological crisis, but we are dismayingly good at reassuring ourselves by finding order in small things," he said. "I want to create a historical lens through which to see our own practices of interpretation in another light."

The inspiration for Passannante's Guggenheim and ACLS project came while writing his recently published second book, "Catastrophizing: Materialism and the Making of Disaster," which traces the literary and philosophical history of catastrophizing, or imagining the worst. The book touches on everything from Leonardo da Vinci's musings on the destructive forces of nature to the doomsday predictions of Renaissance astrologers.  

"I was struck by the way ideas about scale were connected to ideas about the nature of God," he says. "I wanted to understand how and why people argued historically that God is present in even the smallest of things and how they translated this claim into a feeling."

Established in 1925, the Guggenheim Memorial foundation has awarded more than $360 million to over 18,000 people. Hajiaghayi, Passannate and the other 2019 fellows will be honored next month at a reception in New York City.

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – The speed and complexity of tech innovation—from 5G networks to the prevalence of artificial intelligence—will require more sophisticated and holistic safeguards, according to cybersecurity experts who gathered last week at the University of Maryland’s first Executive Cybersecurity Summit. The first-of-its kind, three-day event assembled over 125 high-level private sector executives, senior policymakers, government leaders and academic researchers, for a broad conversation including not just technical issues but also often-overlooked intricacies of cyber threats, such as human behavior and economic impacts.

“It takes partnerships that span sectors and disciplines to understand a growing threat of this magnitude and complexity,” said University of Maryland President Wallace D. Loh. “Academia already plays a unique role in fostering these partnerships. It’s one of the reasons for convening this summit.”

Sponsored by the University of Maryland’s Office of the Provost, the Executive Cybersecurity Summit was organized by the University’s Maryland Global Initiative for Cybersecurity (MaGIC), a campus entity that promotes and coordinates efforts across the University of Maryland to expand cyber education, research and development activities. The summit was designed to fill a critical gap in the ongoing conversation on cybersecurity by bringing the challenges facing the public and private sector to the research community, and explore not just the technical challenges of cybersecurity, but the tech-induced impacts relevant to organizational leaders.

“I think that the activities and pressures on the ground are so demanding that the public and private sectors have a tendency to move too fast to solve the immediate problem, when actually the problem is much more involved,” says Keith Marzullo, dean of UMD’s iSchool. “That need to move quickly limits their ability to think more deeply. And that’s where we can come in.”

Speakers included Rick Ledgett, former deputy director of the National Security Agency; Grant Schneider, federal chief information security officer and senior director of cybersecurity of the National Security Council; Jon Darby, director of operations for the National Security Agency; Major General Linda Singh, Adjutant General of Maryland; Curt Dukes, VP and GM of CIS; Congressman Dutch Ruppersberger, Maryland’s 2nd District; and Debora Plunkett, former director of the NSA’s Information Assurance Directorate.

Many of the experts stressed the urgency for building the professional workforce on all sides of the cyber issue to include law, public policy, communications and enterprise. Schneider pointed to engagement with both cyber and non-cyber staff as critical to risk management.

“Developing that workforce is one of the most critical things we need to do,” he said. “We need more cybersecurity professionals, we need more STEM, people who can hopefully solve all of these cybersecurity challenges for us. We also need more lawyers and people who can translate what the technicians are talking about, and those who understand the business mission and values. We need a far more nuanced conversation between CEOs and CISOs.”  

Speakers also listed a variety of factors—including fledgling technologies, knowledge and communication gaps, even national and regional emergencies—that compromise security and information by offering more points of entry for cyber hackers and nation-states. Singh touched on the Baltimore riots following the death of Freddie Gray, which cyber attackers attempted to exploit to access the state’s systems. That experience was the impetus, she said, for revolutionizing the Maryland National Guard’s cybersecurity system.

“You need to gather the experts but also give them the space create and innovate,” she said.

Research also plays an important role in studying the interconnection of systems and in understanding how they can make us vulnerable. Ledgett pointed to emerging technologies and techniques such machine learning as areas not well-tested or understood in today’s threat environment. Facial recognition in particular, which is poised to change everything from how we buy things to how we travel, is particularly vulnerable.

“I’ve had colleagues tell me that it will take a cybersecurity breach equivalent to Pearl Harbor to change the game,” said Ledgett. “I think that the work that institutions like the University of Maryland and folks in the private sector can do is essential to making that not be the case.”

MaGIC’s Executive Director Daniel Ennis said he expects the summit to be an annual event at the University of Maryland, possibly bridged with a series of lectures that explore a deeper range of topics connected to the cyber issue.

 “Ultimately a lot of these solutions are going to come from the private sector and academia and the research it develops,” he said.