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UMD Team Again Wins National Affordable Housing Design Competition

Contacts:

Maria Day-Marshall 301-405-6795, Lee Tune 301-405-4679

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – For the second year in a row, a team of graduate students from the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation has won the Innovation in Affordable Housing Student Design and Planning Competition sponsored by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). UMD teams finished first last year and second in 2016, their only two previous entries in the 6-year-old competition.

This year the University of Maryland team took first place and the $20,000 top prize with its design for Brooklyn Bend, a mixed-use housing and retail development for low- and moderate-income residents located along San Antonio’s Riverwalk. Results were announced Wednesday. Defending champion Maryland beat out more than 70 other teams, including the other three finalists, second place University of California, Berkeley, and runners-up Yale University and Virginia Tech.

Judges cited the team’s well-developed financial package and understanding of the concepts behind the proposal, and commended the project for having the highest population density among the four finalists. The design, which fronts the San Antonio River, emphasizes energy efficiency, water pollution control and promotion of healthy lifestyles.

Instead of a layout that included just one or two large buildings, the team designed a village-like development with a variety of housing unit designs and sizes to meet a wide range of needs, said Kyle Huck (dual master’s degree program in architecture and real estate development).

“All the proposals were unique in their own ways, but I think what set ours apart was that we really tried to use the site to its highest and best use,” he said, “and not just meet the requirements but to use the site as appropriately as possible to create a proposal that was more dense, which results in a greater amount of affordable housing.”

“We have a lot of dual degrees on our team,” said Cassandra Huntington (dual master’s degree program in architecture and real estate development). “The fact that we have the real estate development degree in addition to the architecture degree gives us a leg up on most of the competition, because we have a better understanding of both the design and the finance sides.”

In addition to graduate students Huck and Huntington, other members of the team are: Lauren Stamm (master’s degree program in community planning); Andrew Mazer (master’s degree program in architecture); and Nyasha Mandima (master’s degree program in real estate development). The team’s advisors are Maria Day-Marshall, director of UMD’s Real Estate Development Program. and Rob McClennan, senior project manager, Bonstra | Haresign Architects, AIA, and UMD adjunct professor.

Donald Linebaugh, interim dean of the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, said the Maryland team's design demonstrated the strengths of the school's interdisciplinary approach.

"Their winning submission was a thoughtful and nuanced response to a challenging site along San Antonio's Riverwalk," said Donald Linebaugh, interim dean of the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. "They drew on their strengths in design, planning, and real estate finance to craft a project that put people and community first, activating the site and delivering a safe, affordable, and beautiful housing solution."

"With 12 dual degree programs in our School," explained Linebaugh, "MAPP+D is a national leader in interdisciplinary graduate education. And the students' innovative winning submission, clearly demonstrates the strengths of our interdisciplinary approach to the built environment."

The San Antonio Housing Authority board, which is looking to redevelop the site, will review the winning proposal in coming months.

According to HUD, “the need for quality, affordable housing has never been greater,” and its affordable housing competition is intended to “advance the design and production of livable and sustainable housing for low- and moderate-income people through research and innovation.”

“When it comes to creating innovative affordable housing, HUD does not do this work alone,” HUD Secretary Ben Carson said in a statement. “Congratulations to the University of Maryland and all of our finalists, for their consciousness stream of good ideas that increases housing opportunity for Americans with modest incomes.”

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University of Maryland Statement Against Hate and Bias

Contacts:

Katie Lawson, 301-405-4622

Statement Against Hate and Bias

Joel Seligman, AVP for Communications and Marketing - November 5, 2017

UMD sincerely regrets the overwhelming misunderstanding resulting in the #UMDNotAHome social media conversation. The statements on social media connected to this hashtag do not reflect the positions of the university or our leaders' mutual commitment to diversity and inclusion on campus and across our nation.

To put it plainly, the UMD administration stands against hate and bias in all of its forms and wants every Terp to feel welcome, safe and at home at the University of Maryland.

In recent months, there have been instances of intentional provocation by hateful, far-right groups spreading targeted messages that the administration finds despicable. These outside agitators want to divide our campus community into factions that are in conflict with one another from within UMD, rather than see our campus stand together in opposition to the broader forces of hate, white supremacy, anti-immigrant xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia and anti-semitism.

It is understandable that some members of our community are also disturbed by remarks by university officials, even when the comments are quoted entirely out of context and in a manner that misrepresents the meaning. UMD has seen an example of one of our longtime colleagues unfairly criticized for her efforts to provide legal advice to the University Senate Campus Affairs Committee literally at the same time she is working to advance the cause of inclusion.

The administration encourages all members of our community to work together—students, faculty, staff, administrators and alumni—to increase respect, inclusiveness, and cohesiveness on our campus. A comprehensive list of efforts underway by UMD administration is available at umd.edu/umdreflects

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UMD Named a 2017 Best College by MONEY Magazine

Contacts:

Jennifer Burroughs, 301-405-4621

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – The University of Maryland ranked No. 11 among public universities according to MONEY Magazine’s 2017 list of Best Colleges. UMD ranked No. 20 overall among U.S. institutions.

To calculate rankings, MONEY assessed more than 700 colleges in the U.S. based on three equally-weighted categories, including educational quality, affordability and alumni success. MONEY measured 27 factors within these categories covering areas such as instructor quality, measuring the study-to-faculty ratio, affordability for low-income students and value-added earnings, which measures if the school is launching students to better paying jobs.

Earlier this year, UMD was also ranked a Best Value College by Forbes, Princeton Review and Kiplinger’s Personal Finance.

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UMD Capitol Hill Forum Addresses Health Disparities Research & Action for Equity

Contacts:

Contacts: Elise Carbonaro, 301-405-6501

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – The University of Maryland, in collaboration with Rep. John P. Sarbanes and the Big Ten Academic Alliance, recently convened more than 100 people for a Research on the Hill forum focused on strategies to achieve health equity at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, D.C. Moderated by Stephen B. Thomas, Ph.D., professor and director of the Maryland Center for Health Equity in the UMD School of Public Health, the panel discussion engaged experts from academia, federal health agencies and the private business sector in a candid conversation about how to eliminate racial and ethnic health disparities among vulnerable populations.

“Our exploratory research holds the solutions to many of the most challenging problems of our day,” said UMD Vice President and Chief Research Officer Patrick G. O’Shea, Ph.D. “As a university, it is our mission to create and understand knowledge to develop better ways to house and heal and fuel and feed our people in advanced societies that are just, secure, and free. Achieving health equity touches on the ‘heal’ aspect of that mission.”

The topics ranged from the progress that has been made in access to medical care as a result of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to challenges that still remain in improving quality of care and in making the medical care system incorporate public health and address the social determinants of health that prevent people from acting health promotion and disease prevention recommendations.

“The state of Maryland has embraced the ACA and there is clear evidence that the new incentives are indeed moving hospital systems away from a fee-for-service business model to one that rewards quality care and positive health outcomes over the volume of procedures,” said Thomas. “While the transition is not perfect, our state is a national leader for what the future of health care will look like.”

Panel members shared examples of effective and innovative community-based health interventions and public-private partnerships that are making a difference through culturally-tailored health promotion and disease prevention services, and highlighted the emergence of social determinants of health such as poverty, discrimination and residential segregation as factors that must be overcome.

“I’m convinced that if you address racial and ethnic disparities with respect to the delivery of health care and health care coverage in this country, you will build the best health care system we can possibly have because diversity is our country’s hallmark,” said Congressman Sarbanes, who, as a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has been a tireless advocate for improving healthcare quality and addressing health disparities.

To achieve health equity, researchers, policymakers, and industry leaders must address broader issues beyond the traditional biomedical model and build trust between those who control health care delivery system and those who have lost hope in the system, said members of the panel.

The panelists recommended that health equity be incorporated into all public policies, not just those related to health care, to reduce and ultimately eliminate health disparities.

Panel members included:

Margo Edmunds, Ph.D., Vice President, Evidence Generation and Translation at Academy Health;

J. Nadine Gracia, M.D., M.S.C.E., Deputy Assistant Secretary for Minority Health and Director of the Office of Minority Health within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services;

Julia Huggins, President of Cigna Mid-Atlantic;

Kolawole Okuyemi, M.D., MPH, Professor of the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, Director of the Program in Health Disparities Research and Inaugural Endowed Chair for Health Equity at the University of Minnesota; and

Eliseo Pérez-Stable, M.D., Director of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities at the National Institutes of Health.

House Democratic Whip Steny H. Hoyer, who represents Maryland’s 5th Congressional District and is a distinguished UMD alumnus, also joined the event and emphasized that as an interconnected community, we should all care about health disparities.

“It is unacceptable that in the United States, where all are created equal in the words of our Declaration of Independence, that one’s access to healthcare may be higher or lower as a result of race, gender, or income,” said Congressman Hoyer. “Everybody being healthy is of concern to each and every one of us.”

He discussed how we must continue to defend the patient protections that Americans are benefiting from thanks to the ACA, such as the no-cost access to preventive services like mammograms and immunizations, as well as remind people of the dramatic increase in the number of people, particularly people of color, who now have health coverage as a result.

The event was held as part of the University of Maryland’s Research on the Hill series, which is aimed at raising awareness of research with great societal significance.

View the conversation at: https://youtu.be/HPedKr0jZLQ

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UMD Study Finds Connecting Uninsured Patients to Primary Care Could Reduce ER Use

Contacts:

Kelly Blake 301-405-9418
Hillery Tsumba 301-628-3425

Montgomery County, Md. Initiative Could Improve Health, Reduce Costs

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – An intervention to connect low-income uninsured and Medicaid patients to a reliable source of primary health care shows promise for reducing avoidable use of hospital emergency departments in Maryland. A University of Maryland School of Public Health study evaluating the results of the intervention was published this week in the May issue of the journal Health Affairs.

For twenty years, use of hospital emergency departments has been on the rise in the United States, particularly among low-income patients who face barriers to accessing health care outside of hospitals, including not having an identifiable primary health care provider. Almost half of emergency room visits are considered “avoidable.” The Emergency Department-Primary Care Connect Initiative of the Primary Care Coalition, which ran from 2009 through 2011, linked low-income uninsured and Medicaid patients to safety-net health clinics.

“Our study found that uninsured patients with chronic health issues – such as those suffering from hypertension, diabetes, asthma, COPD, congestive heart failure, depression or anxiety – relied less on the emergency department after they were linked to a local health clinic for ongoing care,” says Dr. Karoline Mortensen, assistant professor of health services administration at the University of Maryland School of Public Health and senior researcher. “Connecting patients to primary care and expanding the availability of these safety-net clinics could reduce emergency department visits and provide better continuity of care for vulnerable populations.”

Funded by a grant from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, the initiative engaged all five of the hospitals operating in Montgomery County, Maryland at the time, and four safety-net clinics serving low-income patients. Using “patient navigators,” individuals trained to help patients find the care they need and can afford, these hospitals referred more than 10,000 low-income, uninsured and Medicaid patients who visited emergency departments to four local primary care clinics, with the goal of encouraging them to establish an ongoing relationship with the clinic and reduce their reliance on costly emergency department care.

Two hospitals in Montgomery County who participated in the intervention continued the program after the initial grant period concluded because of the benefits they saw for patients and for reducing emergency department visits and associated costs. These hospitals are currently testing a new version of the intervention specifically deigned to link emergency department patients with behavioral health conditions to appropriate community-based services.

While hospital administrators and health policy experts throughout the country are recognizing that access to primary care improves continuity of care for patients and reduces avoidable use of emergency departments, the implications of this project are particularly important for hospitals in Maryland, which are now operating under a unique all-payer model for hospital payments. Within this new payment structure, Maryland hospitals will have to meet ambitious spending, quality of care, and population health goals. Reducing avoidable use of emergency departments can help in reaching these goals.

The project provides promise not only for hospitals in Maryland but throughout the nation to improve health care experiences and outcomes for their patients. Shared learning systems were an integral component of the project so participants were learning from each other and sharing best practices throughout the project and that learning has now been documented and can be replicated in other communities.

“This was an incredibly rewarding project to work on,” says Barbara H. Eldridge, Manager of Quality Improvement at the Primary Care Coalition. “We created a learning system that permits us to sustain improved communication between patients and their providers, between hospital discharge planners and community based clinics, and across five hospitals operating in Montgomery County.” The initiative has proven successful in Montgomery County, Maryland and is being replicated in communities in other parts of the country.

“Linking Uninsured Patients Treated In The Emergency Department To Primary Care Shows Some Promise In Maryland” was written by Theresa Y. Kim, Karoline Mortensen, and Barbara Eldridge and published in the journal Health Affairs.

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University Launches Dynamic, Interactive Information Website UMD Right Now

Contacts:

Crystal Brown 301-405-4618 crystalb@umd.edu

College Park, Md. – Today, the University of Maryland launched a brand-new multimedia news and information portal, UMD Right Now, which provides members of the media and the public with real-time information on the university and its extended community.

UMD Right Now replaces Newsdesk, which previously served as the university’s news hub and central resource for members of the media. The new site is aimed at reaching broader audiences and allows visitors to keep up with the latest Maryland news and events, view photos and videos and connect with the university across all of its social media platforms.

“We designed UMD Right Now to be a comprehensive, vibrant site where visitors can find new and exciting things happening at Maryland,” said Linda Martin, executive director, Web and New Media Strategies. “Through social media, video, photos and news information, we hope to engage visitors and compel the community to explore all that Maryland has to offer.”

The new website, umdrightnow.umd.edu, contains up-to-date news releases and announcements, facts and figures about the university, a searchable database of faculty and staff experts, information highlighting innovation and entrepreneurship at UMD, additional resources for news media and other campus and athletics news.

“UMD RightNow is the place to go to find out all the things happening on and around campus on any given day,” said Crystal Brown, chief communications officer. “This website brings real-time news, events and information right to your fingertips.”

For more information and contact information for the Office of University Communications, please visit umdrightnow.umd.edu.

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2019 University of Maryland-Phillips Collection Fellowships Awarded

Contacts:

Hayley Barton 202-387-2151 x235, Alana Carchedi Coyle 301-405-0235, Phillips Online Press Room

WASHINGTON, D.C., and COLLEGE PARK, Md.—The University of Maryland Center for Art and Knowledge at The Phillips Collection has awarded its 2019–20 Postdoctoral Fellowships in Visual Culture to Marlaina Martin, Ph.D., and in Modern and Contemporary Art History to Alison Boyd, Ph.D.

The Phillips Collection and the University of Maryland host the postdoctoral fellowships during the academic year. Each fellowship allows recipients to work with the Phillips’s exceptional collection and the University of Maryland’s leadership programs in art historical scholarship, interdisciplinary experimentation, and virtual technologies. During the academic year, fellows teach at least one public lecture and participate in other programs and discussions with scholars, critics, museum staff, and students at the museum and university.

“Dr. Marlaina Martin’s expertise in the anthropologies of race, gender, and media, and Dr. Alison Boyd’s studies on race and modernism complements the Phillips’s strong commitment to fostering an inclusive environment that encourages and values diversity in both our collection and our exhibitions,” said Klaus Ottmann, Ph.D., chief curator and deputy director for academic affairs. “Their work at the Phillips will significantly expand art-historical and cultural scholarship—a mission of the museum and priority of its founder Duncan Phillips.”

“The scholarly works of Drs. Martin and Boyd play a key role in helping us understand our countries’ past and the complex experiences of various identity groups,” said Mary Ann Rankin, senior vice president and provost at the University of Maryland. “We congratulate them on this fellowship and look forward to seeing how their innovative work is advanced and shared over the next year.” Postdoctoral Fellow in Visual Culture Marlaina Martin

Marlaina H. Martin received her Ph.D. from the Cultural Anthropology program at Rutgers University in 2019. During her time there, Martin was a recipient of a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation as well as a University & Louis Bevier Dissertation Completion Fellowship from Rutgers University. Her research interests include critical race theory, colorblindness, and post-racialism; Black feminism; women's, gender, and sexuality studies; body and embodiment studies; cultural studies and media production studies; and anthropologies of race, gender, and media. Her dissertation, “’Making Their Own’: Creativity, Strategy, and Authority among Black Women Media Makers in New York City,” explores the numerous negotiations, decisions, and compromises that Black women independent media makers–as members of a doubly marginalized social group–navigated in order to cultivate authority and develop creative projects.

Postdoctoral Fellow in Modern and Contemporary Art History Alison Boyd Alison Boyd completed her Ph.D. in Art History and as a Mellon Fellow in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Northwestern University in 2017. She studies the intersection of multiple modernities in American and European art with a focus on the arts of the African diaspora, the politics of display, and gender theory. She is writing a book manuscript, "Modernism for America: Negro Art and Primitivism at the Barnes Foundation, 1917–1951," which investigates the racial underpinnings of modern art’s reception in the United States. She is also researching a second project, “‘Your country? How came it yours?’: Divergent Artistic and Political Claims for the ‘Soil’ in America in the 1930s.” This project examines how artists from different American identity groups conceptualized their relationship to the soil; it includes a case study on Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series.

About the Phillips Collection

The Phillips Collection, America’s first museum of Modern art, presents one of the world’s most distinguished Impressionist and American Modern art collections. Including paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Mark Rothko, Alma Thomas, Pierre Bonnard, Georgia O’Keeffe, Vincent van Gogh, Richard Diebenkorn, Henri Matisse, and Jacob Lawrence, among others, the museum continues to actively collect new acquisitions, many by contemporary artists such as Wolfgang Laib, Per Kirkeby, Whitfield Lovell, Zilia Sánchez, and Simone Leigh, and. Its distinctive building combines extensive new galleries with the former home of its founder, Duncan Phillips. The Phillips’s impact spreads nationally and internationally through its highly distinguished special exhibitions, programs, and events that catalyze dialogue surrounding the continuity between art of the past and the present. Among the Phillips’s esteemed programs are its award-winning education programs for educators, students, and adults; well-established Phillips Music series; and sell-out Phillips after 5 events. The museum contributes to the art conversation on a global scale with events like Conversations with Artists and the International Forum. The Phillips Collection values its community partnerships with the University of Maryland—the museum’s nexus for academic work, scholarly exchange, and interdisciplinary collaborations—and THEARC—the museum’s new campus serving the Southeast DC community. The Phillips Collection is a private, non-government museum, supported primarily by donations.

About the University of Maryland

The University of Maryland, College Park is the state's flagship university and one of the nation's preeminent public research universities. A global leader in research, entrepreneurship and innovation, the university is home to more than 40,000 students, 10,000 faculty and staff, and 280 academic programs. As one of the nation’s top producers of Fulbright scholars, its faculty includes two Nobel laureates, three Pulitzer Prize winners and 58 members of the national academies. The institution has a $1.9 billion operating budget and secures $514 million annually in external research funding. For more information about the University of Maryland, College Park, visit www.umd.edu.

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‘Oumuamua Interstellar Object Was Not an Alien Spacecraft

Contacts:

Matthew Wright 301-405-9267

Artist’s concept of ‘Oumuamua. Image credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser (Click image to download hi-res version.)

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – On October 19, 2017, astronomers discovered the first known interstellar object to visit our solar system. Early reports of the odd characteristics of “‘Oumuamua” led to speculation that the object might be an alien spacecraft. Now a new analysis by an international team of astronomers co-led by, University of Maryland Associate Research Scientist Matthew Knight, strongly indicates that its origin is purely natural.

When first spotted by the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System 1 telescope located at the University of Hawaii’s Haleakala Observatory, the object defied easy description, simultaneously displaying characteristics of both a comet and an asteroid. Astronomers formally named the object 1I/2017 U1 and with a common name of ‘Oumuamua, which roughly translates to “scout” in Hawaiian.

Researchers from UMD and around the world immediately raced to collect as much data as possible in the few weeks they had to observe the strange visitor before ‘Oumuamua traveled beyond the reach of Earth’s telescopes. The new findings by Knight and colleagues from some 13 institutions and five countries are reported in the July 1, 2019, issue of the journal Nature Astronomy.

“We have never seen anything like ‘Oumuamua in our solar system. It’s really a mystery still,” Knight said. “But our preference is to stick with analogs we know, unless or until we find something unique. The alien spacecraft hypothesis is a fun idea, but our analysis suggests there is a whole host of natural phenomena that could explain it.”

As Knight and his colleagues summarized in their study, ‘Oumuamua is red in color, similar to many small objects observed in our solar system. But that’s where the familiarity ends.

‘Oumuamua likely has an elongated, cigarlike shape and an odd spin pattern—much like a soda bottle laying on the ground, spinning on its side. According to Knight, its motion through our solar system is particularly puzzling. While it appeared to accelerate along its trajectory—a typical feature of comets—astronomers could find no evidence of the gaseous emissions that typically create this acceleration.

“The motion of ‘Oumuamua didn’t simply follow gravity along a parabolic orbit as we would expect from an asteroid,” Knight said. “But visually, it hasn’t ever displayed any of the cometlike characteristics we’d expect. There is no discernable coma—the cloud of ice, dust and gas that surrounds active comets—nor a dust tail or gas jets.”

Knight worked with Alan Fitzsimmons, an astronomer at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland, to assemble a team of 14 astronomers hailing from the U.S. and Europe. The International Space Science Institute in Bern, Switzerland, served as a virtual home base for the collaboration.

“We put together a strong team of experts in various different areas of work on ‘Oumuamua. This cross-pollination led to the first comprehensive analysis and the best big-picture summary to date of what we know about the object,” Knight explained. “We tend to assume that the physical processes we observe here, close to home, are universal. And we haven’t yet seen anything like ‘Oumuamua in our solar system. This thing is weird and admittedly hard to explain, but that doesn’t exclude other natural phenomena that could explain it.”

The new research paper is primarily an analysis of existing data, including of a December 2017 study of ‘Oumuamua’s shape and spin pattern co-authored by Knight and a team of UMD astronomers. This earlier paper, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, relied on data from the Discovery Channel Telescope (DCT) at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona. UMD is a scientific partner of the DCT, along with Boston University, the University of Toledo and Northern Arizona University.

Knight, Fitzsimmons and their colleagues considered a number of mechanisms by which ‘Oumuamua could have escaped from its home system. For example, the object could have been ejected by a gas giant planet orbiting another star. According to theory, Jupiter may have created the Oort cloud—a massive shell of small objects at the outer edge of our solar system—in this way. Some of those objects may have slipped past the influence of the sun’s gravity to become interstellar travelers themselves.

The research team suspects that ‘Oumuamua could be the first of many interstellar visitors. Knight is looking forward to data from the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), which is scheduled to be operational in 2022.

“In the next 10 years, we expect to begin seeing more objects like ‘Oumuamua. The LSST will be leaps and bounds beyond any other survey we have in terms of capability to find small interstellar visitors,” Knight said. “We may start seeing a new object every year. That’s when we’ll start to know whether ‘Oumuamua is weird, or common. If we find 10-20 of these things and ‘Oumuamua still looks unusual, we’ll have to reexamine our explanations.”

The research paper, “The Natural History of ‘Oumuamua,” the ‘Oumuamua ISSI Team (Michele Bannister, Asmita Bhandare, Piotr Dybczyński, Alan Fitzsimmons, Aurélie Guilbert-Lepoutre, Robert Jedicke, Matthew Knight, Karen Meech, Andrew McNeill, Susanne Pfalzner, Sean Raymond, Colin Snodgrass, David Trilling and Quanzhi Ye), was published in the journal Nature Astronomy on July 1, 2019.

The December 2017 research paper on the object by the UMD research team was, “On the Rotation Period and Shape of the Hyperbolic Asteroid 1I/‘Oumuamua (2017 U1) from Its Lightcurve,” Matthew Knight, Silvia Protopapa, Michael Kelley, Tony Farnham, James Bauer, Dennis Bodewits, Lori Feaga and Jessica Sunshine, was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

This work was supported by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (Award Nos. ST/P0003094/1 and ST/L004569/1), the National Science Foundation (Award Nos. AST1617015 and 1545949), NASA (Award Nos. GO/DD-15405, GO/DD-15447, NAS 5-26555, NNX17AK15G and 80NSSC18K0829), the National Science Centre in Poland (Award No. 2015/17/B/ST9/01790) and the European Research Council (Award No. 802699). The content of this article does not necessarily reflect the views of these organizations.

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University of Maryland, University System of Maryland, and Board of Regents Joint Statement on MSCHE Accreditation Decision-- June 28, 2019

Joint Statement by University System of Maryland (USM) Board of Regents Chair Linda Gooden, USM Chancellor Robert Caret, and University of Maryland College Park (UMCP) President Wallace Loh on the Decision by the Middle States Commission of Higher Education (MSCHE) Regarding the Accreditation Status of UMCP:

MSCHE on June 27, 2019 placed UMCP on warning that “its accreditation may be in jeopardy because of insufficient evidence that [it] is currently in compliance with Standard VII (Governance, Leadership, and Administration).” This Standard requires that UMCP “operate as an academic institution with appropriate autonomy.”

Therefore, MSCHE requested a monitoring report due March 1, 2020, demonstrating compliance with Standard VII, followed-up by a MSCHE team visit. MSCHE will provide guidance on its expectations. Meanwhile, UMCP remains fully accredited.

USM Board of Regents, USM, and UMCP are committed to working together to ensure that the governance structure clearly specifies the roles, responsibilities, and accountability of each constituency and that these are in full alignment with MSCHE Standard VII; moreover, that there is periodic assessment of the effectiveness of governance, leadership, and administration in accordance with Standard VII. Progress towards full compliance is already underway and will be completed by March 1, 2020.

Related materials:

Supplement Information Report (Feb. 2019)

MSCHE Visiting Team's Report (April 2019)

UMD's Response to MSCHE Visiting Team's Report (April 2019)

MSCHE Decision Letter (June 2019)

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University of Maryland, City of College Park to Host Fourth of July Celebration

Contacts:

University of Maryland: Natifia Mullings, 301-405-4076
City of College Park: Ryna Quinones, 240-487-3508

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – The University of Maryland and the City of College Park will host its annual Independence Day celebration on Thursday, July 4 from 5 to 10 p.m. at the University of Maryland, Lot 1 (adjacent to Campus Drive off Adelphi Road). The celebration will include a free concert by The Nightlife Band followed by a 30-minute fireworks show. Food will also be available for purchase.

Schedule of activities include: