Research and Scholarly Work

On a rainy Thursday afternoon in September, cell phones across College Park buzzed with a tornado warning from the National Weather Service (NWS) advising people to take shelter and avoid windows.

By 6 p.m. the threat had passed, the warning had expired and life resumed as normal.

That’s not always the case in areas where a tornado, flash flood or hurricane rips through a community, destroying property and taking lives—a tragedy often made worse because many Americans are either unfamiliar with or choose not to heed NWS severe weather alerts.

Now three faculty members from the University of Maryland’s Department of Communication are looking to improve how forecasters communicate such threats, through a $368,675 grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA).

Over the next two years, Associate Professor Anita Atwell Seate, Professor Brooke Fisher Liu, Assistant Professor Jiyoun Kim and Meteorologist Daniel Hawblitzel from NWS Nashville will seek to provide a scientifically validated risk communication toolkit and integrate it into NWS’s training curriculum.

“The NWS has long sent out these warning messages aimed at ‘something’s gonna happen soon, take action,’” said Liu, whose research investigates how government messages, media and interpersonal communication can motivate people to respond to and recover from hazards. “But now with social media we have a lot more flexibility to design notifications. We have new channels and ways to make direct connections with folks to best inform them about severe weather.”

Ensuring these messages reach the public is especially urgent now as scientists across the world warn that intense weather events will continue to worsen due to climate change. The fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA), released in 2018, said warming-charged extremes "have already become more frequent, intense, widespread or of long duration." With a little less than two months still left to go, the 2020 hurricane season is the second most active Atlantic hurricane season on record—after 2005—and has already exhausted the list of 21 names used to identify the tropical systems.

Beginning next month, the researchers will conduct two workshops with NWS forecasters and broadcast media partners from across the tornado-prone states of Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi. Whereas the Great Plains have the most tornado occurrences in the country, the Southeastern United States experiences the most death and destruction in the country from tornadoes, due in part to tornado activity throughout a large portion of the year and to strong storms known as “quick spin-ups.”

During the workshops—which were intended to be in person but will be held virtually—the participants and researchers will construct messages that aim to increase the public’s tornado literacy, encourage appropriate and increase trust and satisfaction with local weather forecast offices.

“We’re going to take a participant-action approach, relying on the lived experience of these meteorologists,” said Atwell Seate, a self-described “weather nerd” who uses social science research to study intergroup communication. “Together we’ll look at existing messages and figure out why we think they’re effective and how we can make them better.”

The team will then finalize a number of sample messages that will be tested in nine online experiments with an estimated 10,000 people throughout 2021.

In the final project stage, the research team will work with the NWS Training Center to develop new risk communication training modules for forecasters across the nation.

Kim, who studies how the public processes science messages, said the project is an excellent opportunity to examine how a combination of science and social science can enhance the public good.

“This is an awesome synergistic project because we have expertise on both sides,” she said.

By Jessica Weiss ’05 | Maryland Today

Photo by Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle via AP.

By Mary Therese Phelan

Five teams of researchers from the University of Maryland, College Park and the University of Baltimore are splitting nearly $500,000 in seed grants to respond to the challenges of COVID-19 in Maryland and beyond.

Projects will focus on new vaccines and therapies, affordable testing for the disease, how to encourage vaccine acceptance among people most at risk from the virus, and artificial intelligence-supported telehealth, the MPowering the State initiative announced today. MPower is a strategic collaboration that highlights and combines the strengths of both institutions for the good of Marylanders.

“This pandemic is not just a medical crisis; it’s a complex human crisis, which requires a multidisciplinary response,” said Roger J. Ward, UMB interim provost and executive vice president and dean of UMB’s Graduate School. “We knew that tapping the power of the strategic partnership would bring together top thinkers from all of the areas of our expertise in medicine and public health, as well as in the social and behavioral sciences, policy and law.”

The selected teams consist of faculty from UMCP’s College of Arts and Humanities, School of Public Health and College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences, partnering with researchers from UMB’s schools of medicine, pharmacy and nursing.

“Through MPower, we can bring together our significant and complementary research strengths to respond to this public health crisis,” said UMCP Provost and Senior Vice President Mary Ann Rankin, who also serves on the Joint Steering Council that selected the grant awardees from 50 applications. “Our goal is to harness our collective faculty expertise to accelerate critical research that will reduce the impact of COVID-19.”

The projects are:

“Predicting and Improving COVID-19 Vaccine Acceptance Among African Americans during the Coronavirus Pandemic” received $98,432 to help understand why African Americans, who suffer disproportionately from the adverse health and economic impact of the pandemic, might accept or reject the anticipated COVID-19 vaccine. The goal is to develop and evaluate communication messages that could be used in a broader health promotion effort to improve COVID-19 vaccine acceptance among African Americans. The findings will help address COVID-19 health disparities and inform pandemic vaccine communication across ethnic and racial groups. The team includes:

• Xiaoli Nan, professor of communication and director, Center for Health and Risk Communication at UMCP;
• Sandra Quinn, professor and chair, Department of Family Science, and senior associate director, Maryland Center for Health Equity at UMCP;
• Clement Adebamowo, professor, epidemiology and public health, Institute of Human Virology, and associate director of the Population Science Program, Marlene & Stewart Greenebaum Comprehensive Cancer Center at UMB;
• Shana Ntiri, assistant professor, family and community medicine, and medical director of the Baltimore City Cancer Program, Marlene & Stewart Greenebaum Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Click here to read more about the other funded projects.

Sensors deployed in the Arctic provide critical information to scientists such as thickness of ice, and air and water temperature. But the devices can cost $40,000 each, and researchers are lucky if the sensors make it a full year before being encased in ice or succumbing to a curious polar bear.

Cy Keener knows this firsthand. The UMD assistant professor of sculpture and emerging technology lost his last two sensors in 2019 to those exact perils. Now he’s hoping to make sensors more accessible and less expensive for himself and other researchers through a nearly $207,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

The five-year grant will allow Keener to continue to develop and test a low-cost, open-source buoy to provide meteorological and oceanographic data, a project he has been working on since 2016. In collaboration with Ignatius Rigor, a senior principal research scientist at the University of Washington, the grant enables Keener to join Rigor’s team for annual travels to the Arctic, and funds new visual art pieces depicting the thinning of Arctic Sea ice.

Keener is working with the UMD Office of Technology Commercialization and outside counsel to form a company that will manufacture and sell a deployable sensor package for roughly $500, a fraction of their current commercial cost. This could “double the number of sensors” currently operating in the Arctic Ocean, he said, potentially enhancing a critical dataset used in weather forecasting and studies of climate and climate change.

Collaborating with the U.S. Naval Academy, Keener is also developing a sensor package that can survive being dropped from an airplane. 

“That’s the way to get more of them in the field, because access is really difficult,” Keener said. He hopes to be able to eventually deploy 200 sensors annually, a significant increase from the five or six he’s used in the past.

Keener traveled to the Arctic in Spring 2019 with Rigor, the coordinator of the International Arctic Buoy Programme, whose members maintain a network of buoys across the expanse of the Arctic Ocean. On that trip, Keener installed measuring instruments that he then used to create a series of art pieces. 

At VisArts Gallery in Rockville, Maryland, he displayed “Sea Ice 71.348778º N, 156.690918º W,” an installation that used hanging strips of 6-foot-long, blue-green polyester film to reflect the thickness and color of the Arctic ice as collected daily via satellite from the buoys.  

He also created various versions of “Digital Ice Core,” a sculpture piece that used electronics, data and satellite communication to link a remote field site with a digital light sculpture, made up of 1,000 LED lights. Viewers were then able to see a recreated version of the ambient light in the air, ice and ocean in close to real time. 

“It’s an honor to be involved in this work and to use my art to get people to understand what’s happening up there,” he said. 

By Sala Levin ’10 
Jessica Weiss ’05 contributed to this article. 

With most area museums shuttered to the public due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a University of Maryland design professor and her students have organized a way for people to experience an exhibition addressing diversity, inclusion and ableism from home.

“Redefine/ABLE: Challenging Inaccessibility” is open now at the Virtual Peale, the Peale Center for Baltimore History and Architecture’s newly launched 3D virtual space, created in Second Life, an interactive online world.

Although “Redefine/ABLE” was originally intended to be installed in two different physical locations—the Carroll Mansion in Baltimore and the Herman Maril Gallery on the University of Maryland, College Park, campus—and include multiple sensory experiences, the virtual exhibition aims to mimic the feel of a true museum. It offers a visual and audio experience and is also screen reader friendly.

The exhibition’s content explores the realities and challenges of persons with disabilities and interrogates the idea of “normal” within historical, cultural and ethical contexts.

“It’s a very immersive way to be in a space,” Associate Professor of Design Audra Buck-Coleman said about the exhibition in Second Life. “There’s warmth and humanness and in many ways it's more accessible than a physical space as visitors can move around how they like. They can even fly.”

Students in Buck-Coleman’s graphic design cohort began researching disability in Fall 2019 with the goal to share unheard stories from the disability community and to use design to create a model of more inclusive, accessible spaces. They partnered with the Peale Center and three institutions in the United Kingdom—University of Brighton, the Royal Pavilion and Museums and the De La Warr Pavilion—to plan a participatory exhibition that would prompt visitors to reconsider ableist language and share their own stories about disability. The exhibition would involve the physical transformation of both museum settings for improved accessibility, such as through additional ramps and widened doorways.

But in mid-March, just two weeks before the exhibitions were supposed to open, COVID-19 caused the closure of both spaces. By June, it was clear they would remain closed through the summer.

As originally intended, the Peale launched a website dedicated to the exhibit and its content. Redefine/ABLE is also on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok.

But the gallery announced that it would also extend into Second Life, allowing visitors to explore Redefine/ABLE from “inside” a virtual version of the 1814 museum building. Redefine/ABLE was the Virtual Peale’s first ever exhibit.

Redefine/ABLE Creative Director Maiu Romano-Verthelyi ’20, art, was one of two students who continued to work on the project over the summer—after she graduated—and helped transition it into the virtual world.

“Working on this project really opened my eyes to the power designers have to change people’s experience of the world,” said Romano-Verthelyi. “I wanted to stay on and see it through.”

She was disappointed to lose various components of the original exhibit design, from QR codes to a marble voting station to a mechanism to visualize color blindness. But, the virtual world also “brought a lot of accessibility to the table,” she said.

“You have people of all levels of tech understanding and a lot of anonymity in Second Life, so it’s a great place to simply go and explore.”

The project was supported by Maryland Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Maryland Historic Trust in the Maryland Department of Planning, the Maryland Department of Labor, UMD Friedgen Family Design Fund, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the U.K. Research and Innovation’s Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Find details on how to visit the “Redefine/ABLE: Challenging Inaccessibility” exhibition on the Peale Center’s website.

By Jessica Weiss ’05

Assistant Professor of Sculpture and Emerging Technology Cy Keener has received a grant from the National Science Foundation to continue his work blending science, technology and art to convey the thinning of Arctic Sea ice.

The five-year grant, totaling nearly $207,000, will allow Keener to develop and test a low-cost, open-source buoy to provide meteorological and oceanographic data, a project he has been working on since 2018. In collaboration with research scientist Ignatius Rigor, a senior principal research scientist at the University of Washington, Keener will also travel to the Arctic and make visual art with data collected through the instruments deployed.

Given that such buoys normally cost thousands—or even tens of thousands—of dollars, the $300-$500 device Keener is seeking to develop could potentially “double the number of sensors” currently being used in the Arctic Ocean, he said. That could enhance a critical dataset used in weather forecasting and studies of climate and climate change.

“It’s an honor to be involved in this work,” said Keener, who teaches art and electronics at UMD. “And to use my art to get people to understand what’s happening up there.”

Keener first traveled to the Arctic in Spring 2019 with Rigor, who is the coordinator of the International Arctic Buoy Program (IABP), whose members maintain a network of buoys across the expanse of the Arctic Ocean. On that trip, Keener installed measuring instruments that he then used to create a series of art pieces. 

At VisArts Gallery in Rockville, Maryland, he displayed “Sea Ice 71.348778º N, 156.690918º W,” an installation that used hanging strips of 6-foot-long, blue-green polyester film to reflect the thickness and color of the Arctic ice as collected daily via satellite from the buoys.  

He also created various versions of “Digital Ice Core,” a sculpture piece that used electronics, data and satellite communication to link a remote field site with a digital light sculpture, made up of one thousand LED lights. Viewers were then able to see a recreated version of the ambient light in the air, ice and ocean in close to real time. 

Currently, he is seeking to improve a custom circuit and code that he has been working on since 2016, that will go in the sensors. He is hoping to travel to the Arctic in Spring 2021.

Photos courtesy of Cy Keener.