News & Stories

Few people can boast to UMD Dining Services naming an ice cream flavor in their honor. One of those few is Sapienza Barone ‘77, who retired in 2018 after working 41 years at the university, including 25 years as executive assistant for three presidents. “Sapienza,” a rich vanilla bean ice cream with chocolate chips, chunks of fudge brownie, a chocolate swirl, and crème de cacao, was created to honor Barone’s long service to Maryland.

Ralph Crosby ’56 lives by four simple words: inspiring actions that matter. It’s a mantra that’s guided him since 1973, when he launched Crosby Marketing Communications, Inc. The firm, which employs 120 people in Annapolis, Md., and Washington, D.C., started when “marcomm” was in its infancy. The company has since evolved into one of the nation’s most successful independent marketing communications firms.

In working with hundreds of growth-focused entrepreneurs and CEOs around the world, Seema Alexander ’00 starts with two simple questions: “Why does your business exist?” and “What makes you unique?”

Whether you’re asking Google for driving directions or enabling your computer’s spam filter, artificial intelligence – or AI – is an indispensable part of life. The idea that computers can perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as speech recognition and decision-making, was once the stuff of science fiction. For Adriana Avakian ’12, the future is now.

When Roy Schwartz ’98, MBA ’01 co-founded the online news website Axios in 2016, he was guided by a singular mission: articles would be 250 to 500 words, and bullet points would help busy readers digest the day’s headlines in a matter of minutes. Schwartz even helped fashion a term for the approach: smart brevity.

Dr Ashley Minner’s mission has always been to share stories of Baltimore’s urban, intertribal American Indian community with the world. She hopes to continue that work in her position as Assistant Curator for History and Culture at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington, D.C.

In the nascent days of the COVID-19 global pandemic, doctors and medical researchers were scrambling to understand what treatments could help stop the effects of the deadly virus. Dr. Merdad Parsey was six weeks into his position as Chief Medical Officer at the global pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences when they began hearing about coronavirus cases in China.

Have you heard of “fake news” or struggled to discern if a photo was real or had been digitally altered? This is just one area where Dr. Matthew Stamm’s lifework has been crucial, by separating fact from fiction in ways that drill down to forensic traces of digital alterations. Stamm, the head of the Multimedia and Information Security Lab at Drexel University and an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, conducts research in information forensics, which is designed to investigate 21st century media programs. In a world where trust in media content waxes and wanes, governments struggle to discern what digital intelligence is trustworthy, and people question the truth of what they are seeing or reading, Stamm and his team work to unearth “deepfakes” through sophisticated neural networks.

A Pulitzer Prize finalist by age 26, Nora Eckert has shined a light on some of society’s greatest challenges including effects of climate change on the health of inner-city neighborhoods, COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes, and organ procurement. Her curiosity prods her to illuminate important subjects for the public to know, including the future of the auto industry in her current reporting role with The Wall Street Journal.

For the last five years, Olivia Owens did it all at IFundWomen, a funding platform for women-owned businesses and the people who want to support them with access to capital, coaching and connections. Owens worked in marketing, business development and partnership, leading to 2020 when she launched IFundWomen of Color to address disparities.