It is a sweltering weekend in late August and Professor Dennis Pogue is revisiting a small, simple frame building at a private residence in Richmond, Virginia. The structure, which Pogue estimates is from the late 1850s, is in bad shape, but he has made a convincing argument for the owners not only to save it, but to seek out recommendations for how to preserve it.

The eight-week “Grand Challenges of Our Time” course will welcome 80 freshmen to explore four critical issues: COVID-19, the Black Lives Matter movement, climate change and voting access.(Photo by John T. Consoli) Freshmen at the University of Maryland are wading through the most unconventional semester in generations, whether learning online or living in a single dorm room while the world wrestles with a pandemic, social unrest and an increasingly fraught presidential election.

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – Brian O’Neill – an Earth systems scientist who studies the relationship between future societal development, emissions and climate change impacts – has been named the new director of the Joint Global Change Research Institute (JGCRI).

The goal of the Maryland Professional Development Schools 2025 project is to come up with effective classroom strategies and mentoring techniques for interns and young teachers, as well as new career ladders and pay incentives that help retain quality educators. (Photo by iStock) A new collaboration between the University of Maryland and the state’s two largest school districts will create innovative training opportunities for education students, bolster professional development and promote equity across Maryland public schools.

A new $2.5 million National Science Foundation grant will support University of Maryland-led research on how family-school collaborations that build on the strengths of multilingual families and teachers might improve math learning for multilingual students. Projections suggest that multilingual students will make up 40% of all K-12 students by 2030. Because of language and cultural mismatches and scarcity of school resources needed for success, many such students are in severe need of expanded learning opportunities, the researchers said.

UMD researchers will use natural language processing and machine learning to analyze the language used in the U.S. Congress in an attempt to understand how legislators decide how to vote, before expanding beyond politics. (Illustration by iStock) Up to now, computational models in political science often zeroed in on decisionmakers’ characteristics—where they’re from, their party, their age—but a new UMD project goes a step further, adding how lawmakers use language to analyze why they vote the way they do.

A multidisciplinary team of University of Maryland researchers is partnering with public officials, transit advocacy groups and other universities to improve transportation options for Baltimore City residents, particularly those in low-income neighborhoods that rely on bus and light rail systems.

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – Rain International LLC, the seed-powered health company, has licensed a patent application related to the use of seed-based nutrition from the University of Maryland’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, a leader in food science discovery and technology. The inventor of this technology isLiangli (Lucy) Yu, Ph.D., an established researcher in food chemistry and molecular human nutrition.

While deep learning is an increasingly popular form of artificial intelligence used in products and services that impact hundreds of millions of lives—it’s deployed in robots, driverless cars and systems that decide who should go to jail and who should get a credit card—no one quite understands how it actually works.

A team of UMD researchers funded by a new $2.5 million grant will study how marriage and kinship in impoverished communities in Nairobi, Kenya (pictured) shape childrearing there. (Photo by Shutterstock) The old adage “it takes a village” refers to the support network of family and community necessary to raise a child, and now a multidisciplinary team of University of Maryland researchers will spend the next five years examining how the proverbial “village” functions in rapidly urbanizing yet impoverished communities in Kenya.