TERP
SPRING 2026

A Wimpy Kid Grows Up
Bestselling Kids’ Author Jeff Kinney ’93 Shares the Lessons Learned From His Own Misadventures. pg. 18

Table of Contents
Campus Life
4	Keeper of the Codes
5	First-Term Senator, First-Time Professor
6	Digital Revival of a Displaced Community
7	Celebrating a M-ilestone
8	Homegrown Heroes
 
Explorations
10	Libraries’ New Chapter:
Havens in Times of Crisis 
10 	A Recipe for Paring Down Plastic Pollution
12	Where the Cloud Hits the Ground
13	The Doctor Will See Your Plant Now 
13	Model Musician
14	World Wide Reb
15	Cracking da Vinci’s Genetic Code
16	Made About America

Post-Grad
38	Alumni Association
40	Your Guide to D.C.’s Urban Oasis
41	Class Notes
42	The Mathemagic Touch
43	Underexposed
44	Parting Shot

Features
18	Diary of a Wimpy Terp
Jeff Kinney ’93 was a shaky student and failed newspaper cartoonist with a big dream. Recounting some of his own misadventures, he reveals that despite being one of the world’s top-selling authors, he’s still figuring things out.
By Jeff Kinney ’93
32	Can AI and People Play Nice?
Trivia nerd and UMD computer scientist Jordan Boyd-Graber is on a quizbowl quest to shed light on when to trust computers, or ourselves.
By Chris Carroll


Online
Spring Break Surprise
Instead of digging their toes into the sand, animal science students were knee-deep in hay to welcome a new foal to the Campus Farm.
go.umd.edu/spring-break-surprise

—
Marsha, Marsha, Marsha
After 44 years on campus, Stamp Director Marsha Guenzler-Stevens retires, leaving a legacy of love.
go.umd.edu/marsha

—
A Spoonful of Support
Undergraduates in an entrepreneurial design class Do Good by creating an electronic mealtime tool for a boy with limited arm mobility. 
go.umd.edu/a-spoonful-of-support


From the President
one of the best things about the University of Maryland is our incredible alumni. The entrepreneurs, journalists, educators, architects, astronauts, physicians, artists, writers, scientists, athletes, innovators and entertainers we are both proud and fortunate to claim as Terps are proof that when it comes to creativity, innovation and fearlessness, Maryland is one of one. We take immense pride in what every one of our graduates represents, and how they continue to live out the mission and values they embraced here—the fearless pursuit of discovery, service and storytelling that inspires, uplifts and impacts the public good.
Jeff Kinney ’93, creator of the “Wimpy Kid” phenomenon, is certainly among them, and we are excited to showcase his new, original artwork and essays in this issue of Terp. Inside these pages, Kinney uses his trademark humor to describe how even the most successful people encounter stumbling blocks, ranging from the banal to the life-changing—and how a few missteps in college (“I was a bit of a mess,” he confesses) aren’t predictive of how things will turn out if you take chances, build your skills and have a bit of good luck. His advice is both heartening and timely, especially as we celebrate Commencement.
In fact, one of the honors of my presidency was welcoming Kinney back to campus twice in 2022, first to dedicate a statue of “Wimpy Kid” Greg Heffley in the Stamp, and then as Commencement speaker. Warm, humble and honest, Kinney delivered an address no one there will forget.
This year, we are honored to have former NASA astronaut Jeanette Epps M.S. ’94, Ph.D. ’00 as our Commencement speaker. As an International Space Station flight engineer in 2024, Epps spent 235 days in orbit, a record for the longest continuous space mission by an African American woman. She was a featured CNN commentator this spring about Artemis II, the flight around the moon that once again showed how human ingenuity, innovation and endeavor know no bounds.
I hope this time of year provides each of you with an opportunity to also look back fondly on your own time in College Park, think about the lessons you learned, and appreciate how you have continued to grow and pursue the dreams you first had on our campus.

Sincerely,
Darryll J. Pines
President, University of Maryland
Glenn L. Martin Professor of Aerospace Engineering


Letters to the Editor
Testudo, Meet Tuxedo
What a fun behind-the-scenes on Testudo’s threads, and I love that Terp students led and created the designs.
—Dori K. Stibolt ’93, Lake Worth, Fla. (via Linkedin) 

Sweet No. 16 
I enjoyed the privilege of working with President John Toll as a student leader. He shared his ambitious plan to propel UMD into the ranks of the nation’s top public universities, and it’s satisfying to see that vision paying off with this well-deserved No. 16 ranking (from U.S. News & World Report). The dedicated leadership over the decades has truly built on that foundation. 
Go Terps!  
—Steven Carlson ’82, Bronxville, N.Y. (via Linkedin)  

Always have been proud to be a Terp, especially as we helped lead the way as journalism transitioned from triple carbon sets on WWII-era manual Royal typewriters from the Pentagon to electronic production and eventually multimedia. What a ride! 
—Melissa Merson ’76, Arlington, Va. (via Linkedin) 

—
Write to us
We love to hear from readers. Send your feedback, insights, compliments—and, yes, complaints—to terpfeedback@umd.edu or to:
Terp magazine Office of Marketing and Communications
7736 Baltimore Ave.
College Park, MD 20742


ON THE MALL

Keeper of the Codes
Researcher Resurrects Top-Secret 20th Century Machines

A University of Maryland researcher and his collaborators huddled last summer over a captured, top-secret military device, racing to decode a message that might have had the potential to change history. But materials science and engineering Assistant Professor’s Tim Koeth’s mother-in-law was getting impatient: “Come on, guys—war’s over.” For 80 years, in fact.
With his wife and father-in-law, Koeth was using an original Enigma machine as part of an annual contest to read never-decrypted German World War II communiques. A scientist who studies materials in extreme radiation environments, Koeth became fascinated by the code machines as a child when they were first declassified in the ’80s; the Enigma’s notoriety later spread via “The Imitation Game,” a Benedict Cumberbatch movie chronicling scientist Alan Turing’s effort to crack the device and win the war.
Decades later, when a collector friend revealed he’d purchased one and asked Koeth to get it working again, it sparked a unique hobby. Today Koeth restores—and uses—a range of cipher machines for the National Cryptologic Museum at Fort Meade, Md.
Technologically, he says, they’re dead simple, with adjustable rotors setting the code for the day and “an electrical current passing through a maze of wires.” But the history they represent—and that they enabled—is the height of human drama and tragedy. “Sometimes I can’t believe I’m holding one of these,” he says.—CC

1 // Enigma machine (Germany, 1926-45)
Developed for both military and business use, Enigma was solved by Polish mathematicians several years after its introduction. More advanced versions created for the Nazi war machine were cracked at Britain’s famed Bletchley Park codebreaking facility.

2 // SIGABA (United States, 1941 to mid-’50s)
Also called the ECM-Mk II, the American device featured a tape printout rather than more-common light-up display. Using 15 rotors compared to the original Enigma’s three, it was the only cipher machine never broken during the war. (Koeth made the device on the left operational for display at the museum and is currently restoring the other.)

3 // M-209 (United States, 1942-53)
Tiny compared to the 90-pound SIGABA, this six-rotor, fully mechanical device was far less secure, but deemed adequate for battlefield communications in World War II and the Korean War. 

4 // KL-7 (NATO, 1953-83)
Introduced by the National Security Agency and distributed throughout NATO member nations, it was compromised by a U.S. mole in the late ’60s who walked into the Soviet embassy in Washington and supplied information about the device. 

5 // NEMA (Switzerland, 1945-94)
The Swiss government developed this sleek, 10-rotor machine based on the Enigma. Starting in the 1990s, the declassified devices were sold as surplus. For anyone interested in getting into the retro-spy game, Koeth says, “Keep an eye out, because they pop up on eBay all the time.”—CC


First-Term Senator, First-Time Professor
Angela Alsobrooks Co-teaches Class on Leadership
Between tackling the child care crisis and protecting the Chesapeake Bay on Capitol Hill, first-term U.S. Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.) found a new challenge to take on this spring: Teach her first college class at the University of Maryland. 
Called “What’s Leadership Got to Do With It?” the upper-level government and politics course examined personality and morality, challenging students to think about decision-making and navigating crises in fields such as politics, health care and sports.  
“Leadership is the way we elevate our country,” says Alsobrooks. “I hope the class encourages these students to be interested in leadership in whatever fields they pursue.”  
She co-taught in person every week with government and politics Chair Antoine Banks, leading discussions and drawing on her own experiences as a state’s attorney, Prince George’s County executive and now, the third Black woman elected to the U.S. Senate. 
“We’re at the heart of government here” at UMD, says Banks. “It’s a really exciting opportunity for our students.”  
Alsobrooks recruited a series of executives to serve as guest speakers, including Baltimore Ravens President Sashi Brown, former Children’s National Hospital CEO Dr. Kurt Newman and U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, giving Terps the opportunity to explore what effective leadership looks like across industries. 
The two dozen students ranged from a former Marine to a current Maryland General Assembly intern. “They’re a really great, sharp bunch,” says Alsobrooks. “I’m really inspired by these young people.”—KS 


Digital Revival of a Displaced Community
New Exhibit Tells Story of Nearby Lakeland With Help From UMD Students and Faculty
At the virtual intersection of Lakeland Road and Rhode Island Avenue, a tableau that laces together past and present unfolds. Next to a solar-powered smart device telling riders when the next bus is coming sits the former Mack’s Market, a mid-century general store with an ice cream counter and a billiard parlor.
It’s one of the interactive digital streetscapes featured in a new exhibition at the College Park Aviation Museum that create a portrait of Lakeland, a vibrant Black neighborhood near Lake Artemesia that existed for 75 years before being mostly bulldozed. 
“This is going to allow Lakelanders … to see something they haven’t seen for many years, and show their children and grandchildren,” says Quint Gregory, director of UMD’s Michelle Smith Collaboratory for Visual Culture, who assisted in developing “Reclaiming Our Space: The Story of Lakeland,” an effort led by residents and students.
Lakeland originated in the 1890s as a resort-style suburban community, designed to offer wealthy families more space and privacy out of the city. Within a decade, one of economic disruption, African American residents began to move in, as white people moved out.
 Lakeland became a place where people picked apples from the trees in one another’s yards and had neighbors who felt like “cousins but you’re not quite sure how they’re your cousins,” says Maxine Gross ’81, chair of the Lakeland Community Heritage Project (LCHP).
Flooding had plagued part of Lakeland from its beginnings, and in the 1960s, community members asked for flood mitigation help from the local government. The result was the 1970 Lakeland Urban Renewal Plan, which had consequences they had fought against: the displacement of 104 out of 150 families to make way for Lake Artemesia Park, townhomes and apartment buildings. 
“For that whole period of time, the community was in some degree of upheaval, uncertainty, living on the edge,” says Gross. “I’ve been living a lot with the voices of people who really fought hard and were truly disillusioned.” (The College Park Community Center stands on the site of Gross’ family’s former home.) 
Using LCHP’s digital archive, graduate students in Gregory’s class on collaborative curation worked with Lakelanders to identify themes around which to shape the exhibition: business and entrepreneurship, connection to nature, religion, education and family. Research for the exhibition was partly funded by a grant from the Maryland 250 Commission, recognizing Marylanders’ contributions to U.S. history during its milestone anniversary.
American studies Ph.D. candidate Scherly Virgill, along with graduate students Dramane Batiano, Hannah Brancato, John Hunter and Jamie Myre, helped develop the exhibition in Gregory’s class, and currently works at the College Park Aviation Museum. “We want to make sure that those who still live in Lakeland and future generations can see Lakeland as an enduring place of hope and joy,” she says.—SL

Celebrating a M-ilestone
Fun Facts About Floral Landmark as It Turns 50
It changes color twice a year and even scooted across the street, but the famous floral M has bloomed at the University of Maryland as a campus constant for a half-century.
Formerly known as the M Circle, it took root at the intersection of Campus and Regents drives in 1976 to mark the nation’s bicentennial. In 2020, the M settled into its new home in front of the Mitchell Building to make way for the state’s light-rail Purple Line. Over the decades, it’s become one of the university’s most beloved landmarks and has served as the backdrop for countless Terp commencement photos.
Com-M-emorate its 50th anniversary with five flower-filled facts.—AK

M for the USA
The M Circle debuted with red and white petunias raised by the horticulture department (now Plant Sciences and Landscape Architecture) on an elevated portion of the traffic circle. The physical plant department (now Facilities Management) formed a 33-foot-wide, 34-foot-tall Gothic M out of railroad ties.

Lighting the Way
Terps graduating in 1986 and -87 let the M shine at night by contributing lights as their class gift, and new uplighting has been installed since the M’s move.

Planting Pride
While other campus flower beds switch up their blooms, the M stays “tried and true” with its flower types, says R. Scott Rupert ’85, associate director of the arboretum and landscape services. A team fills the M with 900 bronze leaf red begonias in late spring, then yellow panolas, a viola-pansy hybrid, in late summer.

A Unique M&M
UMD never wanted to be without this landmark, so when it relocated, two Ms were temporarily visible at once; the original bloomed in the background as work continued to make the new one blossom.

Building Blocks
A. James Clark School of Engineering faculty salvaged and dried wood from the willow oak trees around the first M Circle, which is now available for special projects. A UV printer will enable direct printing on the wood, says Assistant Dean of Strategic Operations and IT Jim Zahniser, and Terps can execute ideas at Terrapin Works’ Keystone Woodshop.


Homegrown Heroes
How Maryland Athletics Recruited 3 Top Local Athletes
The trio of incoming Terps weren’t wearing capes when they first assembled on the Xfinity Center court during a men’s basketball game last December. But as they were introduced to the crowd, Maryland’s own “DMV Avengers” gave fans powerful new reasons to marvel.
Zion Elee, Baba Oladotun and Quincy Wilson, all from nearby high schools, were among the top football, basketball, and track and field recruits, respectively—not just in Maryland, but in the nation. And all three, known by the superhero nickname along with sophomore quarterback and Glen Burnie, Md., native Malik Washington, had just committed to staying home to don the red, white, black and gold.
“That’s what we really want to focus on: building Maryland as the destination for these elite athletes that play in our area,” says Barry P. Gossett Director of Athletics Jim Smith.
In a quickly evolving college sports landscape, with name, image and likeness deals, revenue 
sharing, and the transfer portal all in play, what does it take for these superstars who could go anywhere to pick College Park?  We roll back the game film on the recruiting wins.—AK

ZION ELEE 
Sport: Football
High School: St. Frances Academy (Baltimore)
Claim to Fame: No. 1-ranked player in Maryland and No. 2 in the nation; UMD’s highest-rated recruit of all time
Chose UMD over: South Carolina, Auburn, Alabama, Georgia, Ohio State, Oregon and Penn State

With the Terps coming off a disappointing season, Maryland might’ve seemed like a longshot for one of the country’s top edges. But through eye-opening chats with head coach Mike Locksley, whose staff had been following Elee since he was an eighth-grader, Elee saw the potential in the program right around the corner.
“He explained how no matter what team I played for in the Big Ten, we’d still be playing each other. We play ranked teams, big games, just like every other team,” Elee says. “So no matter where I went, I would’ve developed. It’s just about where I felt comfortable.”
Communication and connection proved key throughout the process, including through a strong St. Frances-to-UMD pipeline. Aazaar Abdul-Rahim, Maryland’s co-defensive coordinator who gave Elee his first college offer as a sophomore, had mentored his St. Frances coach, making Maryland “feel right.”
The connection extended to Elee’s family: His mom, who’s from Nigeria, isn’t as familiar with the X’s and O’s of college football. Locksley’s staff shared the gameplan—on and off the field.
“Even more important (to her) was the life after football and the wraparound services that benefit a top player in the country,” Locksley says.

BABA OLADOTUN 
Sport: Basketball
High School: James Hubert Blake High School (Silver Spring)
Claim to Fame: No. 1-ranked player in Maryland and No. 10 in the nation; UMD’s second highest-rated recruit
of all time
Chose UMD over: Arkansas, Georgetown and Kentucky

Born and raised just a few miles away in Silver Spring, Md., Oladotun has long cheered for the Terps, from Melo Trimble to Jalen Smith to Derik Queen.
Even when head coach Buzz Williams took the helm last year and Maryland’s roster flipped over, the star wing still found a familiar face in the program: assistant coach and director of player personnel Aki Collins. Before Oladotun worked to graduate early and become part of the 2026 college recruiting class, Collins had tried—unsuccessfully—to bring him to Overtime Elite, a league for 16- to 20-year-olds in Atlanta.
“‘Even though you turned me down twice … it’s not gonna happen a third time!’” Collins recalls joking with Oladotun during a visit. “The two of us had known each other so long, and he told me, ‘I knew you weren’t gonna lie to me.’”
Oladotun and his dad also bonded with Williams through regular talks, not just about the coach’s basketball philosophy, but also about their shared faith. That, along with the Christian campus ministry, where Oladotun’s two older Terp sisters are active, “drew me and my family closer,” he says.
“Being able to rep my state on my jersey with my last name on the back, that’s a once-in-a-lifetime feeling,” Oladotun says.

QUINCY WILSON 
Sport: Track and Field
High School: Bullis School (Potomac)
Claim to Fame:  2024 Olympic gold medalist; youngest track and field male Olympian in U.S. history; under-18 400-meter world record holder
Chose UMD over: South Carolina, USC, Texas A&M and UCLA

Recruiting an Olympian required a team effort at UMD.
That started with head coach Andrew Valmon, a fellow gold medalist who competed in the 1988 and 1992 Games and owns the 4x400 world record. Having that level of accomplishment to look up to was a game-changer for Wilson, who won the 4x400 relay in Paris in 2024.
“It’s relationship-based,” Valmon says of developing Olympians, a process his staff also has experience with. “We used that approach: We all have understanding about what his path is going to look like.”
But the track and field crew weren’t the only Maryland coaches on “Team Wilson,” as Valmon calls it. Locksley chatted with him for more than two hours, the only football coach to take the time to meet. Women’s basketball head coach Brenda Frese, whose son also runs track, talked up Maryland to Wilson’s parents at a meet.
Even President Darryll J. Pines got special NCAA permission to visit Wilson’s home in Bowie, the first time he’d ever done so for recruiting, to emphasize UMD’s academic benefits. And the “cherry on top,” Wilson says, was Gov. Wes Moore’s support, including a congrats call after his commitment.
Another bonus? Campus is close to Wilson’s mom’s fried chicken and mac ‘n’ cheese.
“Why start somewhere else when you’ve already built something from the ground?” he says. “You can just keep on adding to it.”


Libraries’ New Chapter: Havens in Times of Crisis
Professor Develops Field Guide for Providing Services to Help Communities Facing Challenges
After operating out of a double-wide trailer for 40 years, the Kreutz Creek Library in York County, Pa., opened a sleek new building in 2022. But this happy ending had a twist: Now that the library was located a mile outside a small rural town, teens and others without cars couldn’t easily reach it.
Thanks to guidance from a new resource developed by a University of Maryland researcher, Manager Jennifer Johnson joined a countywide coalition seeking transportation solutions—starting as simple as offering rides on social media or using public school vans.
College of Information Professor Mega Subramaniam led the creation of “Centering Community: Library Staff Responding to Crisis” to help libraries better serve their communities amid challenges ranging from natural disasters to social inequities. Developed during COVID-19, an updated version was released in December with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
“Libraries offer far more than books: They provide physical space where people gather, technology for people to use, expertise, information professionals and human connection,” especially critical during crises, Subramaniam says.
Formed through sessions with library teams across the country, the field guide presents strategies for preparing for and responding to emergencies, like building relationships and involving community members in decision-making.
So far, it’s resulted in a variety of successes, from a library in Iowa providing a place to email insurance claim documents after storms to one in New York offering a locker with free hygiene products for youth in need.
“You feel like you’re wearing a toolbelt,” Johnson says. “It’s not just this intellectual exercise. It has very practical applications.”—AK


A Recipe for Paring Down Plastic Pollution
Armed With AI, Researchers Cook Up Greener Alternatives for Everyday Products

Like a sprinkle of domestic magic, those pre-measured pods of detergent, fabric softener and brightener that hit the market more than a decade ago have made life a bit easier. But it’s unclear whether laundry pods, made of a plastic called polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), fully dissolve in standard wastewater treatment, potentially leading to less-charmed outcomes for ecosystems and even human health.
That cleaning conundrum, along with impacts from thousands of other kinds of plastic in daily life, prompted University of Maryland engineering researchers to search for biodegradable alternatives—natural substances that mimic plastic without the potentially toxic remains. 
“It’s a massive pollution problem with no single solution,” says chemical and biomolecular engineering Assistant Professor Po-Yen Chen. He’s leading the project, which is supported by a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation and stems from a UMD Grand Challenges Grant.
Studies suggest that exposure to plastic additives like BPA and phthalates can disrupt hormones and may trigger inflammation, oxidative stress and DNA damage, while some plastics may increase cancer risk. A recent study even suggests climate effects, finding the presence of these microplastics could be reducing oceans’ ability to absorb atmospheric carbon.
The United Nations estimates that worldwide, people produce more than 430 million metric tons of plastic yearly, with some types persisting in the environment for centuries.
Until recently, the biggest obstacle to Chen’s search for greener products was time; finding formulations that meet a product’s requirements for characteristics like strength, opacity and moisture management is a huge task. “Even with our current library of 23 natural components like cellulose, gelatin, carrageenan, gluten and additives like sorbitol and glycerol, to test all possible combinations would take 1.8 million years,” he says.
Here comes artificial intelligence (AI) to the rescue. With AI, plus robots and computer modeling, “we can do those same tests in just a few months,” Chen says. He likens the process to making soup, adding ingredients in varying proportions “until you get the very tastiest soup you can make”—but in this case robots are adjusting the recipe at lightning speed, learning and applying findings about each ingredient as they go.
Chen’s team focuses on single-use plastics like food packaging. With AI mixing and matching to meet the product’s physical requirements, some clear successes have emerged: For example, in a project with the Food and Drug Administration, the team developed a food film derived from shellfish shells that’s transparent, compostable, moisture-regulating and even antimicrobial. In a comparison study, the team’s alternative wrap significantly outperformed standard plastic wrap at preserving cucumbers, fending off mold and shriveling for 15 days, and gave avocados a longer shelf life, too.
“We don’t expect to get rid of all the plastic already out there,” he says, “but we hope to vastly reduce future production, and pollution, by creating replacements we know to be safe.” —jennifer s. holland m.s. ’98

New Phase of Grants Program Launches
UMD is doubling down on its progress in accelerating solutions to humanity’s most pressing issues in our communities and around the globe through its Grand Challenges Grants Program.
Three years ago, the university awarded $30 million to research teams and individual investigators—50 projects in all, tackling vital questions in areas ranging from global health to safe and efficient energy production to the promotion of economic growth and equality.  
That investment has paid off in a surge of $55 million in additional funding for the projects unlocked from external sources.
Now UMD has introduced the Grand Challenges Grants Program 2.0, and will announce funding late this spring for up to 10 creative new institutional and team projects.
“We have been tremendously impressed and inspired by the bold ideas and solutions that resulted from the first round of Grand Challenges Grants and can’t wait to see how the proposals generated for version 2.0 continue to move our campus, state, nation and world fearlessly forward,” Senior Vice President and Provost Jennifer King Rice and Vice President for Research Patrick O’Shea wrote when announcing the expansion.


Where the Cloud Hits the Ground
Can Engineering Researchers Make Data Centers Better Neighbors?

Doomscrolling, influencing, backing up to the cloud, having AI write that report for corporate—it’s all well and good until a data center springs up next door.
From Prince George’s County nooks to L.A.’s exurbs, America is having a reckoning with its Extremely Online status. Local residents and environmentalists are fighting to stop construction of these sprawling buildings that hold internet and artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, fearful of noise, pollution and resource consumption: Large facilities can swallow millions of gallons of water daily and jack up regional electric rates.
Unless we all decide to swear off modern technology, data centers are likely to keep growing. With skill and innovation, though, their worst qualities can be tempered, says a group of researchers in UMD’s A. James Clark School of Engineering.
“We need data centers, but they’re not always good to live nearby,” says civil and environmental engineering (CEE) Professor Birthe Kjellerup. “One thing UMD can do is to be the place people can come to discuss these issues, and to solve them.” Here are four solutions that she and colleagues are developing:

De-Gunkify Heat Transfer
Data center heat transfer systems use water for cooling, but water tends to grow microorganisms no matter what you do. The result is biofilm buildup, an insulator that forces the systems to work harder and more wastefully than when they’re clean. Kjellerup’s research aims to reduce microbial growth and redirect biofilms to noncritical areas of the system.

Sweat the Processor Cooling
Taking inspiration from nature—how we sweat, to be precise—and then cranking that cooling potential to the limit, mechanical engineering Associate Professor and Clark Faculty Fellow Damena Agonafer has developed a two-phase evaporative cooling technology fit to chill high-powered AI processors. As a result, they’ll operate more efficiently and consume less electricity.

Waste Not, Heat Not
Inside the data center, heat from all those humming servers and AI processors hurts operations. Move it outside and it can be repurposed as green energy. Both Kjellerup and Agonafer are developing methods to harvest data centers’ wasted energy for heating other buildings and industrial processes.

Make the Grade
Leading an effort for the American Society of Civil Engineers, CEE Chair Nii O. Attoh-Okine is looking to create a data center “report card” to objectively measure performance “just like we do with tunnels, bridges and any other big infrastructure project,” he says. With standards for noise, water use, generator smoke and many other operational factors in place, he says, data centers might lose some of their bad reputation.—CC

Ask the expert: advice for real life
The Doctor Will See Your Plant Now
Ana Cristina Fulladolsa’s latest patient isn’t showing a positive on the virus test strip. A culture is inconclusive. And talking about symptoms? Forget about it.  
That’s because it’s a sickly strawberry, sent to Fulladolsa to examine as director of UMD’s Plant Diagnostic Lab. For nurseries, farmers and landscapers across Maryland, she’s their own “Dr. House,” investigating languishing leaves, rotting roots and deformed daffodils.  
“Every day, you’re solving a puzzle,” says the assistant research professor. She works closely with state and national agencies as well as the University of Maryland Extension to monitor new diseases and pests, prevent outbreaks and educate the public. She offers these tips on how to grow healthy plants: 

• Pay Attention to Your Plants  Don’t just dig a hole, plop some daisies in it, then love them not. Ask the nursery for advice on watering and fertilizing, and consider first getting a soil test to understand pH and nutrient levels. 
• Choose the Right Greenery  “Sometimes we really want a particular plant in our garden, but it’s not adapted for this environment,” Fulladolsa says. Native species are best, but no matter what, consider rainfall, sun exposure and space before you plant.  
• Don’t Ignore Issues  If your favorite maple starts losing its leaves prematurely, or your vibrant azaleas are looking yellow and patchy, “the problem’s not going to go away,” she says. Waiting to take action can make it harder or more expensive to manage, or might even doom the plant. 
• Consult Extension  Marylanders can contact Extension’s Home and Garden Information Center online for help; equivalent offices are a great resource in other states. If Extension experts don’t have the answer, they’ll bring in Fulladolsa to do more digging.—KS 


Model Musician
UMD-built AI System Amplifies a Universal-NVIDIA Partnership
A new AI language model that understands music like a trained musician is one beat closer to reaching your devices.
Music Flamingo, developed by UMD and NVIDIA researchers, anchors a recently announced partnership between NVIDIA and Universal Music Group that could revolutionize music discovery and creation. 
Streaming services’ current recommendation algorithms rely on user behavior rather than musical analysis; cue up Taylor Swift and it will recommend Sabrina Carpenter next because listeners who like the first tend to like the second. But Music Flamingo goes deeper, analyzing stylistic, compositional, even emotional content to fulfill user preferences. 
The system was trained on more than 4 million songs and tested on real musicians, who preferred it to existing AI models. “When Music Flamingo came out and started beating everything else, the whole music industry got really interested,” says Ramani Duraiswami, a professor in UMD’s Department of Computer Science and a system co-creator along with doctoral student Sreyan Gosh.
Beyond finding music, the system could help create, promote and safeguard it for artists, Ghosh says, leveraging AI speed and power without quashing human inspiration: “Anything that we build should be loved by the music creator family.”–Jason Dinh


World Wide Reb 
In New Book, Historian Depicts American Revolution as Global War
The Revolution was never just between Redcoats and rebels; it was a world war in all but name, UMD history Professor Richard Bell argues in his newest book, “The American Revolution and the Fate of the World.” 
Bell, who grew up in London where discussion of the war was taboo, presents a panorama of nations and individuals navigating the cataclysm: a Native American woman holding together an American alliance in Niagara; a Philadelphia debutante who becomes a loyalist in London; a Boston schoolteacher who joins a privateering mission and ends up in a British-run detention site across the Atlantic. 
In a conversation with Terp, he recounts a conflict that disrupted trade, restructured penal systems, stirred famine, toppled empires and shaped the world as we know it.–JT  

What’s the book’s main takeaway?
The only way the Continental Army could win was by diverting British forces into military campaigns across the world. They sent their best man, Benjamin Franklin, to Europe in 1776 to meet a team of Britain’s foes—France, Spain, the Dutch Republic and others—who formed a grand alliance to take on British forces in places like the Caribbean and India, where George Washington could not. By the war’s final stages, 70% of Britain’s 100,000 troops were bogged down outside North America. 

What were the war’s ripple effects up to the present? 
The 18th century was a world of empires, and some drew lessons from Britain’s loss, prompting them to increase oversight over their subjects. We see a giant crackdown on colonial insurgency in the Spanish Empire, British Empire, Ireland, India and Sierra Leone. At the same time, the American rebellion is an inspiration to colonial rights-seekers, so you see uprisings in those same countries along with Haiti, France and South America during what soon becomes known as the Age of Revolutions.  

Can you describe one of your characters?
John Moseley was a Black man enslaved in Virginia when the war breaks out in 1775. He throws in his lot with the king’s cause, hoping Britain will guarantee his liberty when its mighty army wins. Well, it loses, and he becomes a refugee in London, where he’s caught committing a crime of poverty. Before the revolution, Britain banished felons to hard labor in Maryland and Virginia, but that ceased after the war. So Moseley boarded the very first prison transport ship to Botany Bay, Australia—the first American to set foot on that continent. 

Have you talked to Lin-Manuel Miranda about a “Hamilton” spinoff? 
He called me, but I told him I couldn’t talk right now, I gotta talk to Terp instead. 


Cracking da Vinci’s Genetic Code
Researcher Helps Establish Possible DNA Link to “Mona
Lisa” Artist
For centuries, authenticating a purported Vermeer or Pollock has largely relied on circumstantial evidence. Curators debated the fluidity and weight of brushstrokes, analyzed paint ingredients and carbon-dated canvasses, but could never fully erase doubts.  
Now, a UMD researcher could change all that—starting with the original Renaissance man’s DNA. 
Cell biology and molecular genetics Assistant Professor Norberto Gonzalez-Juarbe and collaborators in the global Leonardo da Vinci Project (LDVP) posted a study earlier this year linking human genetic material they’d recovered from a disputed work by the 15th-century scientist and artist to letters penned by a relative.
Despite Leonardo’s fame and influence, fewer than 25 works are attributed to him, so any newly verified pieces would be momentous. Beyond that, such DNA research has the potential to transform the art world. 
“There are so many questions in history that have not been answered,” says Gonzalez-Juarbe. With these “next-gen techniques to study art and cultural artifacts, we can understand history in a biological sense.” 
Gonzalez-Juarbe is a microbiome expert, skilled at studying systems with low DNA abundance like the lungs. He was invited to join the LDVP to improve conservation efforts, finding and addressing microorganisms that could damage aging artwork. But when his team recovered human DNA, they realized they had a unique opportunity. 
Gonzalez-Juarbe and colleagues gained access to the privately owned “Holy Child,” a palm-sized red chalk sketch of a young boy, believed to be drawn by da Vinci, then prepped for six months so they could extract the most DNA without damaging the art. On the day, Gonzalez-Juarbe was the only man allowed to take a sample to limit contamination of the Y chromosome they planned to sequence. 
“It’s incredible to be a part of art history,” he says. “If you go to the Louvre, you stand in front of the ‘Mona Lisa,’ but you can’t touch it or do anything with it. Here I am, looking at this drawing raw, with no glass.”
For comparison, the team needed Leonardo’s DNA. But without access to his tomb, it turned to a set of letters penned by his father’s cousin in Tuscany. Those missives had enough genetic material in both the wax sealing’s thumbprint and the string tying them together.
The result: DNA from the sketch and the letters shared a Y chromosome profile, strongly suggesting a link. 
To further establish provenance, the team hopes to test additional da Vinci notebooks and lesser-known pieces, as well as compare DNA from them to descendants tested at the University of Florence. 
Requests are flooding in for the team to verify works by other historical giants. “Now that we have this framework, we can use it for anyone,” says Gonzalez-Juarbe.—KS


Made About America
On Nation’s 250th Anniversary, UMD Celebrates and Reflects Through the Arts

Centuries of artworks have illuminated, romanticized and even criticized the state of our United States. Think of the determination of the first president’s face in Emanuel Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware” or the social commentary on race relations in Jean-Michel Basquiat’s gritty paintings of the 1980s.
This year, as the nation marks the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the University of Maryland is creating, saluting and showcasing art about the American experience.
“The arts allow us to look back at a history that has highs as well as complications, and also help us find a way forward for imagining the future of our country,” says Craig Kier, School of Music professor and executive director of the Arts for All initiative. “They are a way in which we ensure that we’re giving everyone a seat at the table to have their voice be heard.”
Here are some ways Arts for All marked the milestone this spring.


Maryland Day Mural
At UMD’s springtime open house, collagist and printmaker Imar Hutchins led a community project to create murals featuring portraits and influential quotes of Marylander Frederick Douglass. Participants contributed to the paintings and responded to the quotes, reinforcing how individual expressions come together to shape a broader civic and cultural story. 

“America Will Be!”
The exhibition that closed May 9 at the David C. Driskell Center explored the complexities, opportunities, failures and triumphs of the American experiment through objects and images that interpret the power of the U.S. flag.

Sadat Arts for Justice and Peace Competition 
The annual competition co-hosted by the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Justice invited students to submit pieces in music, visual art, poetry and short film on the theme of this quote from former President Jimmy Carter: “In our democracy, the only title higher and more powerful than that of president is the title of citizen. It is every citizen’s right and duty to help shape the future legacy of our nation.”  Biological sciences major Sofia Apgar ’26 earned second place in the visual art category for her work, “Between Us.”

American Anthems: Reflecting on the Nation’s 250th Anniversary 
This concert on Maryland Day presented songs and poems that have become anthems for communities throughout the U.S. Performed by UMD faculty, students and alum artists, the program included “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” “America the Beautiful” and “We Shall Overcome.”

“I, Too, Sing America” Exhibition
(September-October)
A nod to Langston Hughes’ poem, this exhibition hosted by the University Libraries will showcase the research findings of the 1856 Project on UMD’s historical intersections with enslaved people and the African American experience.


Feature: Diary of a Wimpy Terp
Jeff Kinney ’93 was a shaky student and failed newspaper cartoonist with a big dream. Recounting some of his own misadventures, he reveals that despite being one of the world’s top-selling authors, he’s still figuring things out.
Essays and art by Jeff Kinney ’93

In my defense, my family always used cuticle scissors when I was growing up. For the uninitiated, they’re the miniature scissors with a gentle curve in the blade, perfect for cutting fingernails or, yes, toenails. Cuticle scissors were in every medicine cabinet of every bathroom of our family home. 
Nail clippers, on the other hand, baffled me—clearly overengineered for a task that could be performed handily by my reliable cuticle scissors. And besides, every time I had occasion to use nail clippers, I just couldn’t get them to work.
Last year, I found myself in Australia, and I knew I couldn’t make it through a 10-day trip without trimming my toenails. The hotel gift shop’s only option was those infernal nail clippers.
Back in my hotel room, I opened the pack-aging and steeled myself for the challenge.
I positioned a toenail between the curved ends of the nail clipper, squeezed the ends together, and … nothing. Not even a dent.
But then I thought, what if I’m doing this wrong? And so, deeply aware of the ridiculousness of the situation, I typed the following in my phone’s search box, “How do you use nail clippers?”
The search results came back instantly.
I clicked “play” on the YouTube video, and to my incredulous surprise, I discovered that nail clippers have a lever that rotates outward and, when depressed, creates considerable force—enough to cut through, say, the nail on a big toe.
At that moment, I leveled up as a human.
I made short work of my toenails, marveling at the feat of engineering I held in my hand. I was 54 years old.
Why, given the chance to write a cover story for my alma mater’s alumni magazine, would I tell such an embarrassing “I was today years old”-flavored story? Is it to ensure that I’ll never be able to run for higher office?
My aim in starting out this way is to illustrate the fact that I haven’t got it all figured out. Yes, I’ve had some success in my professional life, but my everyday one is filled with failures, dotted with the occasional small triumph. In many ways, I’m just beginning my journey into a more grown-up world.
Some of you might have started reading this piece hoping for sage words of wisdom. You’ve come to the wrong place for that. This essay is written by a children’s author who succeeded despite himself.
But if there’s something you can learn from my failings and shortcomings, that would really be something. And while you’re reading, I’ll be trimming my nails. They’ve gotten a little out of control.


A Slow Study

I know how these things are supposed to go. When I open my freshly delivered copy of Terp magazine in my kitchen, I’m greeted with articles about extraordinary people whose stories of success are inspiring and motivating.
A central thread of most of these stories is how an individual’s time spent at the University of Maryland helped chart their path forward. And while my time at Maryland did indeed play an instrumental role in putting me on the road I’m on now, it would be a stretch to connect those dots too meaningfully.
And so, when I was approached with a request to share life lessons I’ve learned, I had to be candid with the magazine’s editors before agreeing to take the assignment. The truth is, as an undergraduate at Maryland, I was a bit of a mess. In fact, I was the absolute worst. 
This confession seemed to be music to one editor’s ears. “Write about that! People will want to hear it.” And so, buoyed by this perhaps terrible advice, I’ll embark on my story, warts and all.
I started off in Bel Air Hall, then an all-guys honors residence on North Campus, living among quirky, bright 18- and 19-year olds. Rumor has it that one of the guys living on the floor above me went on to co-found Google. It was that kind of place.
My dormmates had an academic discipline that was completely alien to me. As a rule of thumb, if anyone in my orbit was still awake, I couldn’t—wouldn’t—start working on my schoolwork. And when the last person turned in for the night at, say, 1 in the morning, I decided it might be a good idea for me to get some rest, too.
It turns out this way of thinking wasn’t fantastic for my grades. I started off as a computer science major, and quickly discovered that my more studious, more motivated classmates had put themselves on a steady path to academic success. Whereas I spent one entire evening hiding under a dormmate’s bed, just for the jump scare payoff.
After two years of struggle, I was kindly asked to leave the computer science program by an administrator. So I tried on a new identity, as a criminal justice major. Somehow, I graduated just one semester behind my peers.
Still, I finished with a 2.something GPA. The only thing that’s preventing me from looking into what the “point something” actually was is the fear that my mother is reading this right now and will be disappointed in me. 
I can’t stress this enough: Nothing about my academic record at Maryland predicted any kind of future success.
In no way do I blame the university for my academic shortcomings. I was too undisciplined—too entitled?—to see the incredible opportunities afforded to me at a school of this caliber. It would take me years—decades!—to fully absorb what I’d missed out on.
Fast forward 32 years. My son recently graduated from the University of Maryland with a politics, philosophy, and economics major. He had his fun at Maryland—piles of it—but also had the maturity to lock in when it was time to do so. He got the best out of Maryland, and Maryland got the best out of him. And by living vicariously through his four-year ride, I got to experience Maryland a second time around.
For every alum who made the most of their time at Maryland, you have my admiration and  respect. For all those who scraped by like me, maybe you’ll have a kid who goes there, too. But don’t get your hopes up. I’ve heard it’s impossible to get in these days.


Paper Chase

When my son accepted his offer to become a Terp, I said this: Maryland is too big. You have to make it small for yourself, or you’ll get lost.
I knew of what I spoke. When I got to Maryland as a second-year transfer student, I struggled to find my moorings, to find my people. But I had a breakthrough in my third semester on campus.
In the college where I’d started off, I had a cartoon in the paper. It was a weekly, and I’m not sure there was any barrier to entry. If you wrote it, they’d print it.
The Diamondback was a different beast entirely. It had a daily circulation of 30,000, with just three coveted cartooning spots. I tried to break in a few times, but didn’t have any luck.
Then, a miracle. I’ll never forget the day when, while living in a six-person suite in Leonardtown, I got The Call. It was the editor of The Diamondback. One of the cartoonists had dropped out. The slot was mine, if I wanted it.
From that day forward, everything for me got better, and also worse. I suddenly had the attention of every kid who picked up their free copy of The Diamondback—yes, print copies were a thing back then, and phones weren’t yet—but my academic career was effectively on hold, if not finished.
Every night, I made a calculation. Should I work on this homework assignment, which will be seen by one professor, or this comic, which will be seen by upwards of 30,000 students? More often than not, I shot for the bigger audience.
My report card suffered, but my skills as a humorist grew. Every day I’d try to wake up in time to get to the dining hall before lunch ended, to watch kids reading the comic I’d turned in the night before. Sometimes they’d chuckle. Sometimes they’d turn the page, a blank look on their faces. I registered it all. 
A nontrivial side benefit of having a comic in The Diamondback was making daily visits to the newsroom and getting to know the staffers. They were all there to do the same thing as me: to cut their teeth, to figure out what worked and what didn’t, and to develop their skills in front of a sizable audience. This special group of people had managed to pull off quite a trick—to shrink a campus of 1,300 acres down to the size of a newsroom.
Some of those journalists went on to do something even more remarkable—to make the world smaller, more knowable to an audience of news readers. I feel grateful for getting to share that pizza box-littered office in South Campus with them. The work they’re doing now is more important than ever.


An Ignominious Close

I may not have left behind a stellar academic record during my time at the university, but I definitely left my mark. Just not in the way I expected to.
During my last semester, I self-published a compilation of my comics in The Diamondback, “The Igdoof Bathroom Companion.” I even had a well-attended book signing at the Stamp Student Union, which constituted a high-water mark in my life up to that point.
But the brief moment of glory was marred by a colossal blunder that still makes me cringe. I’m wearing a grimace as I write this.
I decided to do a little advertising after the book came out, and printed a few dozen flyers on the most garish neon green paper that Kinko’s had to offer.
After midnight, I set out on a guerrilla marketing effort. The plan? To tape my flyers to every white column of every building on campus.
Of course, I knew the rule against posting advertisements. But I also knew what happened to them. Upon discovery by campus workers, advertisements were swiftly cleared away and disposed of. The evidence of that—four pieces of Scotch tape forming the frame of removed flyers—was everywhere on campus.
I figured that the few hours my flyers remained up might help me get the word out about my book. So I blanketed campus with them and retired for the night.
After dragging myself out of bed sometime around 1 p.m., I went back to campus to see how many of my flyers had survived the inevitable purge.
It was raining, and I pulled the hood of my Charlotte Hornets Starter jacket over my head (it was a different time). But when I set
foot on McKeldin Mall, I was met with an unexpected sight. My flyers did not appear to have been removed. At a distance, I could see neon green rectangles on every pillar I’d placed them on.
But when I got closer to one, I realized the horrifying truth. These weren’t my flyers—they were the stains the flyers had left on the pillars after being soaked with rain. The damage to campus property seemed incalculable.
I got on my scooter and drove to a store, where I purchased gallons of bleach and several rolls of paper towels, then raced back to the nearest pillar and started scrubbing. 
I’ve never worked as hard, physically, as I did in the hours that followed.   
I managed to get most of the green stains out, but traces remained, maybe even to this day. By the time I was finished, the sleeves of my Starter jacket were as full of holes as Swiss cheese. To this day, I can’t look at Starter jackets without cringing, either.
That moment marked the end of my time at the University of Maryland. It seemed like a fitting ending.


Drive-by Advice

Two years after I graduated from Maryland, I found myself in unfamiliar territory. I’d moved to Boston and had gotten a job as a newspaper designer on the North Shore, an hour’s drive from my tiny apartment.
This wasn’t where I’d expected to be. I’d set my sights on becoming an agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms—a not-unrealistic goal, since I’d worked as a computer programmer at headquarters for two years. But then Waco happened, and the agency stopped hiring, so I was sent spinning in a different direction.
Every night when I came home from my job at the newspaper, I worked on my comics submissions, trying to get noticed by one of the big cartoon syndicates, which are the gatekeepers for newspapers. Rejections followed. The only feedback I ever got was when the head of one syndicate wrote, “Change the name” in a ballpoint scrawl. Fair enough. My strip was called “Igdoof.”
At the time, newspapers were starting to contract. Most big cities still had two dailies, but many were now down to one. I knew that my prospects for becoming a newspaper cartoonist—my rock-star dream—might be out of reach.
One day when I was driving north on the highway, I noticed a billboard with a black backing and white letters. It read: “Well done is better than well said.”
The quote was attributed to Benjamin Franklin, and it hit me hard.
I’d been telling everyone I was going to become a newspaper cartoonist. My failure to do so was starting to suffocate me. After seeing that quote, I decided to keep my ambitions to myself until I had something that was worth sharing.
Not long after, I came up with the idea for “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” a book about a flawed middle schooler with an aversion to cheese. But thanks to Benjamin Franklin, I told no one. I toiled in secret on my manuscript for nine years. Because a dream is a fragile thing, and it needs to be protected.
All these years later, I still think about that quote. Who on earth thought it was a good idea to put something like that on a billboard? Couldn’t they have made more money with an ad featuring, say, Joe Camel? 
Whoever it was, and whatever your motivations, this cartoonist thanks you. But it really was a crazy thing to do.


Fun and Games

Every good video game has a few side quests. On my path to becoming a children’s author, I had a serious diversion.
After a one-year stint at the newspaper, I became a programmer for a medical software company (take that, computer science department administrator!) and then an internet video game designer. One day, when I was mowing my tiny lawn, I had an idea.
This was right around the time when iPods and similar devices were proliferating. Suddenly, you could take all your digital stuff with you—your music, your photos, even your books. This was during the heyday of kids’ games like Animal Crossing and Club Penguin, where the goal was to collect a lot of stuff and deck out your avatar and virtual home.
But what if your characters could take all their stuff with them?
This seed of a thought later became Poptropica, a kids’ site that would entertain and educate a generation of kids. 
I wish I could take credit for the coding. But by then, I’d maxed out on my programming skills, which the university had rightly determined were subpar.
If I wanted to get this ambitious product off the ground, I was going to need to bring in a few hired guns.
So I posted a job listing on a website for a lead developer. I got one bite, from a guy named Jordan Leary, who lived in Utah. His resume consisted of a single line: “My work speaks for itself.”
This line grabbed me. What kind of person could be that audacious? Curious, I went through his entire digital portfolio. His work really did speak for itself. It was creative, visionary, maybe even genius. I hired him, and he became the head of a sprawling team of developers and designers who brought Poptropica to life for hundreds of millions of kids.
I found out years later that Jordan hadn’t meant to post that one line instead of his full resume. He’d just written that text as a placeholder, which he’d planned to replace with his actual resume.
If he had, I fear I might have overlooked him. Because confidence that’s backed up by talent is appealing to me.
And to butcher a Sir Isaac Newton quote, if you want to go further than you can on your own, sometimes, you have to stand on the shoulders of geniuses. I’m grateful for the shoulders I was allowed to stand on.


Write Turn

“I wrote a few children’s books ... not on purpose.” —Stephen Wright
The only downside of listening to Benjamin Franklin and keeping your ambitions to yourself is that you stay in a silo, your grand plans untested by people who matter.
In the nine years I worked on “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” not for one second did I think I was writing for children. I know this sounds a bit mad, but it’s true.
Growing up, my favorite section of the bookstore was the Humor section. It was a catch-all for anything that was funny: Jerry Seinfeld’s memoir, collections of dirty jokes and the latest Far Side Gallery.
Having left Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary behind years ago, I had no idea what was going on in the Middle Grades category, or even that there was such a thing. With “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” I had my sights set on the shelves of the Humor section, where the funny stuff went.
My book would be for people who wanted to look BACK on middle school. Sort of like “The Wonder Years” or “A Christmas Story”—childhood revisited through an adult lens.
Plus, my book would be LONG. I had put together a 1,300-page first draft. I wanted to have some shelf presence with this thing.
Once finished, I traveled to New York City with a freshly printed, Kinko’s-bound sampler of “Diary of a Wimpy Kid.” Comic Con was in town that week.
I walked my sample packet around and discovered that this was a consumer-facing show—not really the kind of venue where they’re looking for manuscripts. But I found the right guy, an editor named Charlie Kochman, who liked what he saw.
Charlie took my sample back to his publishing house, where he and his team determined that I hadn’t written a nostalgic look back on childhood. I’d written a children’s book—no, a series—for a middle-grade audience.
I’ve never experienced so much dissonance as I did in that moment. Me, a kids’ writer? 
I’d hate to give myself over to the gimmick of starting AND ending an essay with a quote. But these days, as I look out over lines of 11-year-olds clutching my latest book, I can’t help but think, “Man plans, and God laughs.” Thankfully for me, so do fifth-graders.


Screen Time

In every story, the protagonist hits a few bumps in the road. I’ve had my share along the way.
When my second book came out, I got a call from a movie studio that was interested in buying the rights to “Diary of a Wimpy Kid.” My lawyer told me that studios don’t like to get into bidding wars, so I had 24 hours to consider the offer before they took it off the table.
At that time, I was fully enmeshed in a book tour, and fully exhausted. I was getting four or five hours of sleep a night and making two or three stops a day. So when the clock ran out, I begged my lawyer for one hour of sleep before I made my decision.
My lawyer warned that the offer would be off the table by the time I woke up. I thought about it. I decided the nap was worth the risk. When I woke up, the offer was still there. I’m not sure if this is really a transferable life lesson, but sometimes you just need that nap.
The producer the studio hired to make the film, a Hollywood big-timer, told me how the screenwriting process would work. They’d hire writers to “sing in the same tune” as my books.
I wouldn’t be the screenwriter, but I’d be a part of the process.
I wanted to be the screenwriter myself, but truthfully, I wasn’t even remotely qualified. Sometimes novelists think that if they can write a full-length book, then surely they could bang out a double-spaced 90-page manuscript.
While there are some success stories, more often than not, novelists-turned-first-time-screenwriters get fired and replaced. I didn’t want that to be me.
Three “Wimpy Kid” films later, I’d learned a thing or two about movie-making. My time spent in creative meetings and on location taught me how the sausage got made. And so when the subject came up of hiring a screenwriter to tackle the fourth movie, I raised my hand.
I thought I was ready.
It turns out, I wasn’t. I wrote a well-received first draft, then followed it up with a not-so-well-received second draft. Working on the third, while also writing and illustrating the 10th “Wimpy Kid” book, put me at my desk for upwards of 16 hours a day. And then a plane crashed into the house next to mine—no lie—and I got shingles from the cumulative stress.
Like my first Poptropica hire, my work spoke for itself, but poorly. I hadn’t put in the time to learn the craft. I wasn’t ready for my opportunity. I raised my hand too soon. And I got fired.
Not my finest moment, and one that still stings. But I took my lessons along with my lumps, and over time, learned how to write a proper screenplay.
Since then, I’ve written five scripts for Disney+, all of which have been made into animated films, with more on the way. But my first-effort failure was enough to remind me that I’m capable of falling flat on my face, which is a strong motivation to watch where I’m going.


Think piece

I’ve documented some of my failings in the pages of this magazine, but to balance things out, it seems like the right time to mention a win. Because if my mom has read this far, she deserves something positive.
If I were to flip through the pages of my early books, I could draw a direct connection between almost every vignette in Greg’s journal and something that happened in my life growing up in Fort Washington, Md. Yes, the cheese was a real thing, but I’ll never tell who ate it.
After those first five books, I’d pretty much exhausted the childhood memories that formed my source material. I needed to invent authentic-seeming childhood memories.
And so, I entered into a challenging time. Every year, I wrote a new book, and every year, I tried some new tactic for developing material. I lay on the couch with a blanket over my head. I rode my bike in circles for hours. I took long walks—sometimes 10 miles or more—waiting for providence to deliver me an original idea. More often than not, the idea never came.
Then one day, at the company where I worked, management hired some creativity experts from Tel Aviv to come train us. They had developed a proven system to generate creative solutions, which they called Systematic Inventive Thinking. 
I’ll give you a quick primer. Take an object, like a pair of glasses. List the components: lenses, frames. Now, apply a few tools to each component. Subtraction, division, multiplication and a few more that are a little too involved for this piece.
Let’s subtract the lenses from the glasses. Do we have a product anyone could use? Yes. Sports stars who don’t have problems with their vision but want to look fashionable might use lensless glasses.
What if you subtract the frames? Could anybody use that? Well, sure, if you shrunk the lenses and made them thinner. Now you’ve got contact lenses. 
This method unlocked a whole new world for me as a comedy writer. These days, I start every book with a theme, and I list components that go with that theme. My last book was about a birthday party, so my components were cake, frosting, candles, gifts and about 290 more.
Then, I apply the tools I mentioned above to each component. At the end, I’ve got more than a thousand jokes. I use the best 250.
Now, I feel like I can write books forever. You might not be a children’s writer, but I promise that you can use these tools to overcome hurdles in your life and work. It sure beats riding your bike around in circles.


Book Smart

The first time I was invited to write for Terp 14 years ago, I was given a topic for a brief essay: “Tell us about a time when you were fearless.”
I knew the kind of thing I was expected to write. I was supposed to say I was fearless in doing such-and-such in my career, which led to success in my profession. But I didn’t have anything like that in my punchbowl of experiences.
The truth is, I’ve always been cautious. I don’t let go of the vine behind me until I’ve got a firm grip on the next one. To wit: Eleven years after my first “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” book came out, and 12 books into the series, I was still holding onto my day job at Poptropica, just in case. A profile in courage I was not.
And then, an unexpected spark—of something—took hold. These days, I live in a small town called Plainville, Mass., population 9,000. At its center was a dilapidated building, constructed before Abraham Lincoln was president, that served as a general store for generations of residents. But those days were long gone, and when I moved to town, the building had been empty for 17 years.
So when the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” books started to break out, I had an idea. What if my wife and I bought the building, and put something different in its place? Why not a bookstore?
Growing up in Maryland, we had a chain bookstore in a strip mall not too far from my home. It’s where I bought a book on the professional craft of cartooning. It’s where I found a manual that taught me how to program my Apple IIe personal computer. In short, it put me squarely on my eventual career path.
And then one day the bookstore was just … gone. It didn’t seem right. How could something so obviously good be abandoned so callously? Creating a bookstore in my adopted hometown felt like a way to right that wrong.
But by embarking on that kind of an endeavor, I was way out over my skis. I had to learn about zoning, the board of health, town politics and everything else that comes with building in Massachusetts.
Recently, our bookstore celebrated its 10th anniversary. Just about anyone who’s written a book in the past decade has had an event with us, from Stacey Abrams to Henry Winkler to Hillary Clinton to Matthew McConaughey to Heather Cox Richardson. 
It took a decade to break even, but this year, we did it. It turns out that people still like to read, and they love the magic that can only be found in a physical bookstore.
Most of the time, we live in the world that’s been built for us. But every so often, we get to contribute to the world that the next generation will occupy. Think about what you want that world to look like, and see how you might be able to contribute in ways big and small.


Work in Progress

Anyone who’s cracked open one of my books can’t help but notice that Greg Heffley is a flawed character. In fact, his imperfections are what make him both loved—and loathed—by readers and their parents.
At times, Greg’s flaws are amplified and exaggerated versions of my own. At other times, my imperfections are amplifications of his. It all gets tangled up, and sometimes I have trouble keeping track of where reality ends and the fiction begins.
Here’s the thing about having a successful book series, or a successful anything: When you’ve stumbled onto a winning formula, it validates your behaviors, even the bad ones. Because everything you’ve done has led you up to this point.
Something I’ve learned in the past five years is how wrongheaded that thinking is. Like Greg, I’m a collection of bad habits. Diet, exercise, discipline—I’m a mess in every category across the board.
Truthfully, it all caught up with me in my 50s. I realized I haven’t had success because of my flaws but despite them.
For most of my life, I hadn’t done a good job of taking care of myself. But my days now start with meditation, yoga, stretching and exercise. 
I plan my days and even my years. Never could I have imagined I’d embark on this kind of change.
I’m hoping I can stick around for a while because there are more books to write, movies to make, buildings to build. Grandkids to look after, God willing. 
It’s time to level up as a human being, to figure this all out, to grow. Just like Greg, I’ve got lots to learn.
And by the way, did you know that there’s a hidden nail file tucked away in those nail clippers? Mind blown. 


About the Author
For someone who’s sold over 300 million books, Jeff Kinney is a remarkably unassuming guy. Sure, his studio includes a statue of Scrooge McDuck (rumored to have been previously owned by Michael Jackson) and a 6-foot-tall screen display modeled after Greg Heffley’s dreaded cheese touch (above). But he was kind, earnest and dedicated to making this package come together. This, despite a pile of commitments that would make most of us chuck our laptops into a lake.
Kinney squeezed us in between writing two Disney+ screenplays based on his “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” series. He’s written 20 of the books since 2007, with the latest, “Fight or Flight,” scheduled for publication in October. They’ve been turned into three live-action movie adaptations and four 3D-animated movies. He’s also co-written three books in the “Awesome Friendly Kid” series, written from the perspective of Greg’s best friend, Rowley. 
Kinney and his wife own An Unlikely Story Bookstore & Cafe in Plainville, Mass., and have two sons, one of whom is a 2025 UMD graduate. Kinney returned to his alma mater in 2022 to dedicate a new statue (that looks surprisingly similar in size to Scrooge McDuck’s) of Greg in the Stamp Student Union and to deliver the Commencement address. It was the only time in Maryland history that the words “Zoo-Wee Mama” were used in such a speech.—LB 
Starting this fall, look for a new special collection of UMD merchandise featuring the Wimpy Kid!


Feature: Can AI and People Play Nice?
A Trivia Nerd’s Quizbowl Quest Sheds Light on When to Trust Computers, or Ourselves
By Chris Carroll, photo illustrations by valerie morgan

The May 2019 showdown between people and artificial intelligence (AI) at the University of Maryland wasn’t exactly a “Terminator”-style last stand for humanity—just a quiz game. Yet it represented, in a sense, the final days of an era when flesh-and-blood competitors could beat silicon-based ones built to relentlessly pursue trivia wins.
That day, humankind was represented by four visiting “Jeopardy!” champions. As the game unfolded, the computer buzzed in at least as quickly and accurately as the humans with answers about straightforward facts, like the birthdate of a pop star or the melting point of an element. But other questions required creative logic to link, say, cryptic clues about gender norms to others about religion. 
“What I call squishy questions, the kind that require lateral thinking, tripped up the system sometimes,” says Roger Craig, a “Jeopardy!” Tournament of Champions winner who held the record for one-day winnings ($77,000) for nearly a decade. Thanks to that limitation, he and past winners Aaron Lichtig, Kristin Sausville and Monica Thieu prevailed 190-160. “It wasn’t a nail-biter, but not a blowout either. If we’d played multiple times, I think we would have won maybe 60% of the time.”
But the balance of power in the game they were playing—quizbowl—has shifted. AI technology has evolved by leaps and bounds since that match; the advent of powerful and uncanny large language models behind popular chatbots and image generators is the prime example. People, though, have pretty much stayed the same.
“When it comes to raw accuracy, the computer is now better at answering questions than humans, and I mean humans who are good at this,” says Jordan Boyd-Graber, a UMD computer science professor who hosted the 2019 contest and has been developing the system used in the match, QANTA (Question Answering is Not a Trivial Activity), for nearly 15 years.
As one rough measure of the current state of AI, the system answered a recent set of quizbowl questions he and his research team used in a study with 70% accuracy, while humans managed about 55%. Even on “adversarial” questions crafted by AI experts to exploit its weaknesses and give the advantage to humans, computers are catching up.
Although he built a system that can reliably beat the smartest people on earth, Boyd-Graber’s goal isn’t AI dominance, or to fuel predictions of AI-induced utopias or apocalyptic visions of humanity rendered obsolete.
Now, instead of a face-off, Boyd-Graber is having the two sides team up in a new phase of research. He’s trying to understand what people are good at, what AI is good at, and how this meeting of the minds can bring about benefits for all of society while avoiding, he jokes, our “enslavement by robots.” 
“I want people to be able to live happily and productively alongside AI,” he says, “and to do that we need ways to measure and understand human-computer collaboration.”
What he and his students have found so far is that despite its capability, AI is far too confident in its authoritative pronouncements, while people are unsure when to trust AI suggestions. Should they stand aside for superior intelligences, or tell it to shut up and play quizbowl the old-fashioned way? It’s a question with broader implications for how we live our lives and do our work in the future. Now he’s looking for ways to help AI earn badly needed trust—but also to ensure that humans can always run the show when the time comes to deliver the final answer. 

Quizbowl has been central to Boyd-Graber’s life for 20 years, and he has the wife to prove it.
He competed in high school at a science-focused boarding school in Arkansas, during his undergraduate years at Caltech (where he met the fellow quizbowler he would marry) and grad school at Princeton. Like most who play the game, he’d amassed broad knowledge along with specialties in history and science—he was also the guy to call on for German literature and light opera questions—helping each of his collegiate teams place fourth at national championships.
He’d just become an assistant professor at UMD (where he’s long served as the quizbowl club’s faculty adviser) when AI struck its first major blow in the trivia war. IBM’s Watson, which could respond with encyclopedic knowledge to queries posed in natural, human language rather than in formal query language, beat “Jeopardy!” GOAT and current show host Ken Jennings in a heavily hyped 2011 match. 
There’s nothing unusual about computerized tech besting humans at cognitive tasks. Few would try to race a calculator in basic number crunching, while in the world of games, IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer beat chess world champ Gary Kasparov in 1997. This inaugurated the era of “centaur” chess, in which the best teams were human-AI hybrids (similar to Boyd-Graber’s collaborative quizbowl teams), a situation that persisted until the 2010s, when AI alone could finally beat the best hybrid teams. But math calculations and coldly strategic games like chess bear little resemblance to quizbowl’s complex language play, which seems closer to the ambiguities of real life.
As a specialist in natural language processing, which focuses on computers’ ability to use human language, Boyd-Graber was captivated—and perhaps a bit aggravated—by Watson’s win. “I was jealous about not being involved,” he says. “The two things I did were now coming together in front of me.” 
He set to work on QANTA, publishing his first paper on a trivia answer system, titled “Besting the Quizmaster,” in 2012. By 2015, working with then-UMD student, now Associate Professor Mohit Iyyer Ph.D. ’17 and others, Boyd-Graber had the system running well enough to defeat Jennings in a solo demonstration match at the University of Washington. 
During that faceoff, Jennings said that part of Watson’s winning ability was its superhuman speed hitting the buzzer. But QANTA, he said, wasn’t just buzzing in faster, it was thinking through answers at lightning speed: “It’s legit faster than me, as well as knowing more stuff,” Jennings says in a video of the contest. (Boyd-Graber himself appeared on “Jeopardy!” in 2018, where he came in second with $8,200.) 
Watson—a room-size, heavily engineered crown jewel of one of the world’s most powerful corporations—represents the traditional, statistical approach to AI that stretches back to the mid-20th century. QANTA, by comparison, has comparatively modest hardware demands and springs from a newer type of AI: neural representations. It teaches itself from large datasets, such as the complete text of Wikipedia, and uses computational models that emulate the workings of the human brain.
That difference in cost and scalability of the two approaches is why Watson was retired from the trivia world, while QANTA kept getting better at answering hard questions until it rendered humans passé as trivia competitors. 
Not that this AI-induced obsolescence matters in real life, where millions continue to tune into “Jeopardy!” each weeknight without a QANTA or a Watson in sight. “People want to watch other people competing,” says former champ Craig, himself a computer scientist. “No one is going to care about computers playing a game.”

If humanity is having a moment of self-doubt in the face of AI, the technology itself appears to be overflowing with self-assurance.
By now, we’re all familiar with the crisply stated, often unequivocal answers provided by AI chatbots and even web browsers whether we want them or not. Just one problem: The AI is often wrong. One 2025 study found AI summaries provide misinformation about recent news more often than not. A key difference between premium and free chatbots was the former’s higher level of confidence in its errors.
How AI systems come up with answers—and botch them—has been a central point of Boyd-Graber’s and colleagues’ question-answering research. An early
collaboration with computer science Professor Hal Daumé began with a shared interest in AI systems able to reason in real time, exercising “incremental processing,” as Daumé called it. 
“This is what humans do; we don’t wait until the end of a sentence to start thinking about what’s in that sentence,” says Daumé, director of the Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute at Maryland, which coordinates AI research and education efforts across the university. It infuses UMD’s widely acknowledged strengths in many areas of AI with a particular dedication to leading its ethical and responsible use in society.
The question-answering studies put Boyd-Graber at the forefront of successive “next big things” in AI and computer science time and again, from neural networks to large language models themselves, Daumé says. “His biggest academic flaw is that he’s not good at bragging about himself … (but) his research has been fundamental in a series of things that really resulted in the AI we have today.”
To test computers’ ability to incrementally process, the collaborators chose two applications: simultaneous language interpretation and quizbowl. Daumé had never played, but the game struck him as an ideal test bed: “If you don’t keep up with the question being asked and wait until the end to try and answer, you will definitely lose.” 
Unlike “Jeopardy!,” where competitors can’t hit the buzzer until the announcer has read the entire clue, players in quizbowl can buzz in for “toss-up” questions and offer an answer as quickly as they can blurt it out. The questions are also longer and more complex than on the TV game show; for instance, a question with the answer “King Lear” might start with a hard clue mentioning only a minor character, progressing in several steps to the simple, “Name this Shakespeare play about an aging king.” This inability to break up problems and think on its feet is why Watson—which can only consider a question as a complete unit—would never be able to compete at quizbowl.

Boyd-Graber’s area of study has become more mainstream in recent years, but he was a pioneer at the start, says one of his research collaborators. “One unique thing is that he’s not just interested in accuracy, but other aspects too, like time—how quickly the system can answer,” says Sewon Min, a University of California, Berkeley computer science assistant professor who has worked with Boyd-Graber on natural language question answering. “That’s how trivia games work, but that’s also how actual human communication works.” 
 The opportunity on toss-up questions to buzz as soon as possible with only partial clues makes quizbowl not just a contest of knowledge, but of self-awareness and confidence as well: How much do you trust yourself?
A 2025 study led by Boyd-Graber and presented at the conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics found that the computer competitors trusted their knowledge too much; the AI system provided inflated estimates of its likelihood of being correct on the answers it provided in a game played alongside human teammates (who were better able to gauge whether the answer they’d provided was right). 
The computer was still more likely than people to nail the answer, Boyd-Graber says. But when you weight the raw results by the players’ knowledge of whether they were correct—for example, if humans say they are 25% sure and AI says it is 75% sure that the capital of Persia under the ruler who defeated the Median Empire was Persepolis—the humans effectively come out on top, even though both are wrong.
But wait: If AI gets the correct answer more often than humans overall, isn’t AI simply better, no matter how you slice it?
No, because a confidently delivered wrong answer is far worse than no answer, says Yoo Yeon Sung Ph.D. ’25, first author of the paper on the study. This is particularly true given the range of sensitive societal functions AI is being introduced to, from supporting military decision-making to sifting through mortgage applications.
Sung, whose doctorate is in information science, now works as an applied scientist at Hippocratic AI, a company that creates conversational AI agents to help patients with health care decisions; its motto of “Do no harm” acknowledges the damage that bad AI, like bad medicine, can do in the world. 
“Health decisions are one of the most crucial things people think about using AI, and some of the decision-making can be extremely delicate,” she says. “People have to be able to trust these systems are providing something that is useful and accurate.”
All the upsides of AI—from saving time on tedious tasks to crunching complicated data to potentially solving major societal problems—can benefit us only if people trust the technology can live up to its own confident claims, Daumé says.
“This is really important with ‘agentic AI,’ where it’s actually acting as your agent out in the world,” he says. “If an AI is doing my travel booking for me, I need to be able to trust when it tells me it paid a certain amount, it didn’t hallucinate an extra zero onto the payment—otherwise, I’m not using it.”  

In their most recent research, Boyd-Graber and his team turned their attention more toward the people teamed up with AI than the technology. What they found, essentially, was that human competitors weren’t sure how to react to talented but cocky AI teammates.
In these quizbowl games, humans and computers alike can buzz in for toss-up questions (although if an AI teammate is really hurting the score, its human teammates can “mute” it). Per standard quizbowl rules, the team that wins the toss-up then has a chance to add to the score in a bonus round in which teammates confer before they answer.
In Boyd-Graber’s games, the rules specify that human and AI players come up with bonus answers separately, then compare notes, with the human players ultimately determining the answer. In many cases, computers and humans agreed on the right answer; it was when they disagreed that things got interesting.
“We saw in the previous paper that computers aren’t very good at knowing what they know, and in our new research, it shows people don’t always know whether to trust them or trust themselves,” says Gor, first author of a forthcoming paper in Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
One noteworthy type of disagreement occurred when human players were wrong, the AI player was right, and the people stuck with their wrong answer not because they were simply stubborn, but because the computer failed to provide a logical case for its answer.
The worst-case scenario, says Boyd-Graber, was when the humans had the answer, the computer was mired in error, and people still conceded to their electronic teammate. The group’s paper on the phenomenon, “AI, Take the Wheel,” found that people believe in themselves less than they should, while “AI is banking on trust that it hasn’t earned,” he says.
Like a quizbowl player jumping to answer a still-ambiguous question, humanity is giving up more and more decision-making to AI systems. Boyd-Graber hopes that what he ironically calls a “silly game” can help build the foundation needed for this partnership to pay off: an understanding of the gaps between voluminous facts and knowledge, and between confidence and competence. TERP

Anatomy of a Quizbowl Question
Competition questions start with more obscure clues and proceed to ones that provide more obvious (although not necessarily easy) context, as in this practice question from National Academic Quiz Tournaments. (See answer at left.)
A book by this economist describes an experiment in which it took him nearly a year to license a small garment workshop. Another book on informal economies by this man argues that the assets of the poor are “dead capital.” He proposed formalizing property rights to combat terrorism in the 1986 book The Other Path, whose title plays on the name of a militant group in his country. “The Mystery of Capital” is a book by—for 10 points—what Peruvian economist who shares his name with a conquistador? 
In his classes, Boyd-Graber often assigns students to write “adversarial” questions that take advantage of AI’s weaknesses. This can range from current events not yet included in the system’s training data—for example, the title of a new economics book that came out last week—to more complex approaches, like questions that require computers to use common sense to fill in unspoken parts of questions and logic to piece separate parts of a question together correctly.


ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

Letter From the Senior Executive Director
Commencement season is one of the most exciting times of the year at the University of Maryland. Our Testudo statues and iconic M transform into photo backdrops, Campus Drive fills with families carrying bouquets and cameras, and graduates line up in their regalia to cross the stage. From my office at the Samuel Riggs IV Alumni Center, I have a front-row seat to it all—and the distinct pleasure of welcoming our newest Terps into the alumni family.
It is a powerful network, now 431,000+ strong. On the facing page, you’ll meet just a few of the award-winning alums who make our community extraordinary.
To support Terps everywhere, your Alumni Association hosts a wide range of programs and events, exhibited by a packed spring season. We launched Professional Development Month (featuring our first Alumni Career Fair), showcased esteemed faculty and students moving the future of AI forward and held National Networking Night with more than a dozen events across the country. The EnTERPreneur Conference and Black Alumni Weekend also returned, bringing hundreds of Terps together for networking, learning and meaningful connection. Last but not least, we recently wrapped up our annual Grad Bash, a tradition where graduating students celebrate this milestone and learn how to stay engaged as alums. 
There are myriad ways to get involved. We offer year-round professional development and lifelong learning programs, including our annual Summer Reading Challenge. More than 40 regional, affinity and academic networks offer opportunities to volunteer and engage with fellow Terps year-round. We even have one-time activities such as writing postcards to admitted students, an effort that engaged nearly 400 alums this year.
However you choose to participate, you’re carrying forward a tradition I hold near and dear: Terps supporting Terps. As the alums featured in this issue demonstrate, when we come together, there’s nothing we can’t accomplish.

Jessica K. Roberts ’02 
Senior Executive Director
University of Maryland Alumni Association


The Alumni Excellence AwardsAlums Play Crucial Role in Accelerating UMD’s Momentum
from fighting climate change to creating lifesaving medical technology, our alums are making a lasting impact. The Alumni Excellence Awards honor a select group whose achievements move the university, and the world, forward. Meet the 2026 awardees below and dive deeper into their stories at alumni.umd.edu/excellence.


Forward for TOMORROW’S TRAILBLAZERS
This award honors alums who are expanding access to education, empowering the next generation of leaders and advancing innovation. Their work supports student success—from scholarships and experiential learning to mentorship and entrepreneurship—helping Terps thrive in an evolving world. 
M. Jaysson Eicholtz ’99
Retired COO, Forge Biologics
Eicholtz is an operations professional who has developed labs and other physical spaces that help biotech and pharmaceutical companies create life-saving therapeutics.
Amy Neugebauer M.C.P. ’06 
Executive Director, The Giving Square
As founder and director of the nonprofit Giving Square, Neugebauer helps kids ages 7-14 shape their world through the power of altruism. 
Lyric Amodia MBA ’25
Founder and CEO, The Movement Street
Amodia is the founder of The Movement Street, a nonprofit that inspires, equips and mobilizes lifelong volunteers through culture, creativity and community-based service.

Forward for STRONGER COMMUNITIES
Maryland alums honor the spirit of connection, civic responsibility and creative impact. Through service, innovation, the arts and advocacy, these distinguished Terps are uniting communities, inspiring action and driving meaningful change on campus and around the world. They exemplify what it means to Do Good and do well.
Christopher Koper ’88, M.A. ’92, Ph.D. ’95
Professor, Department of Criminology, Law and Society, George Mason University
A pioneer in evidence-based crime policy, Koper created the globally used Koper Curve Principle to help police departments organize patrols in crime hot spots.
Marie Brodsky ’24
Cofounder and CEO, WISE Connect
Brodsky launched the digital platform WISE Connect to create social opportunities for older Americans. It seeks to cut health risks, including dementia and stroke, associated with isolation.

Forward for Bold AND Brave Solutions
These alums are advancing knowledge, driving innovation and creating real-world solutions to society’s most urgent challenges. Whether through breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, quantum science, literacy or global health, these Terps are shaping a better, more equitable future by turning bold ideas into lasting impact.
Ram Samudrala Ph.D. ’97 
Professor and Chief, Division of Bioinformatics, University at Buffalo
Samudrala invented a pioneering technique to predict disease treatments, analyzing how every drug interacts with every protein in the human body.
Jennifer Jenkins MBA ’16
Chief Science Officer, Rubicon Carbon
A 2007 Nobel Prize recipient with former Vice President Al Gore, Jenkins fights climate change through innovation in the voluntary carbon market.
Luke T. Kues M.P.H. ’25
Executive Director and Founder, True Community
Working to galvanize a “wellness revolution,” Kues founded True Community, which provides first aid and CPR certification in 20 American cities and in Africa.


The Maryland Awards
Each year, we honor the exceptional achievements of seven distinguished alums at A Celebration of Terps: Featuring the Maryland Awards. Presented during an intimate ceremony in November, these awards recognize Terps who have excelled in public service, launched innovative companies and made groundbreaking discoveries. Learn more at alumni.umd.edu/maryland-awards. 

First Lady Dawn Flythe Moore ’97, Hall of Fame Inductee
Brendan Iribe, President’s Award
Omar Tarabishi ’13, M.A. ‘21
Do Good Award, Jackie Cardello ’93
Tyser Gottwals Award, Margo Thomas Ph.D. ’90
Elaine Johnson Coates Award, Rita R. Colwell
Spirit of Maryland Award, Kevin Tu ’23
Outstanding Young Alumnus Award



POST GRAD

Your Guide to D.C.’s Urban Oasis
Alum Leads Country’s Biggest Urban National Park
Brian Joyner’s 24-year career with the National Park Service has taken him to the Grand Tetons, Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park on the Eastern Shore and the National Mall.
But there was only one park where Joyner ’99 could see himself as superintendent: Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C.—and in 2024, his vision became reality. The Prince George’s County native and former history major treasures the park for the natural experience it offers just blocks from the hubbub of city life. 
“You can walk from a neighborhood and be knee-deep in a 1,750-acre forest with a running creek and craggy cliffs that resemble something you might see out west,” he says. “We have one of everything,” from a professional-level tennis venue to the historic (though now closed) Carter Barron Amphitheater to 42 miles of trails and paths. 
The gems of Rock Creek Park extend beyond those in its nearly 3 square miles of wooded terrain. An additional 1,300 acres of parks, parkways, forts and more extending like tentacles throughout Northwest Washington also fall under the park’s jurisdiction. 
Wearing the forest green blazer and broad, flat-brimmed hat made oh-so-chic by NPS rangers, Joyner gave Terp a tour of a few highlights.—SL

 1 Demonstration Orchard 
Since 2012, volunteers have cared for two dozen apple and pear trees on a small patch of land near the historic Peirce Mill. Some of the varieties are the same ones that Joshua Peirce, who owned the Peirce plantation and its mill, advertised in an 1824 catalogue of fruit trees available from his nursery business. 
 2 Divine Science Church of the Healing Christ 
Since 1956, this green-and-white building sitting on park land has been home to a functioning congregation, though services are now mostly held online. 
 3 Fort Stevens 
The site of the only Civil War battle within D.C.’s borders, it’s where 57 troops died July 11-12, 1864, in a victory for the Union. Forty soldiers are buried in nearby Battleground National Cemetery, also part of Rock Creek Park.
 4 Traffic Circles 
Six fall under the auspices of the park. Some, like Grant Circle and Sherman Circle, have their own small parks within the rotary. “During COVID, all those green spaces became incredibly valuable to communities,” says Joyner. “What were only traffic circles a few years ago—and we started to light to make sure cars didn’t run through them—became more active spaces.”
 5 Fish Ladder 
A structure playfully known as Herring Highway helps river herring, shad and alewife bypass a dam built in 1904 that blocks their annual journey to their spawning grounds. The fish can jump up the ladder’s series of small, water-filled steps one at a time.


The Mathemagic Touch
Alum Infuses Tricks With Numeric Principles on Stage and in the Classroom
Want to make your math homework disappear? Matt Baker ’94 has a better idea: Add the calculations to the tricks, and poof.
The Georgia Institute of Technology professor has garnered international renown as both a mathematician and a magician, one who often intertwines the two passions.  
“I work to unearth principles that people don’t know about that are useful in magic, and then make them entertaining,” he says.
First wowed by a magician as a 4-year-old, Baker stocked up on magic books and began performing at birthday parties around age 10. He paused performances while studying math at UMD—the campus didn’t have a magic club then, he says, but joining a student a cappella group improved his stage presence. He later joined the Georgia Magic Club and met influential mentors, like the late magician Simon Aronson. 
That helped him hone his “mathemagic” specialty: using classical mathematical theories to astonish without the traditional sleight of hand. It’s launched him to international stages and even to an episode of Penn and Teller’s show “Fool Us.”
In the classroom, Baker transforms the boring into the bewildering. To demonstrate number theory, he might instruct a student to multiply random numbers together to get a giant string of digits. Pick one of those digits, he tells them, and read the rest aloud. Baker then somehow announces which digit they’re thinking of.
This spring, he joined Doron Levy, professor and chair of mathematics at UMD, and Art Benjamin, a math professor at Harvey Mudd College, to organize the First International Conference on Mathematics and Magic through UMD’s Brin Mathematics Research Center. Around 40 participants converged on campus to exchange ideas, with a public show at The Clarice.
“We can use this as an opportunity to do something even bigger and teach students the philosophy, the psychology, the history of magic, and magic as a performing art,” says Levy. “Maryland could take the lead.”—AK


Class Notes
Rosie Grant MLS ’22 wrote “To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes,” based on her popular TikTok and Instagram posts at @GhostlyArchive, where she researches and re-creates recipes found on gravestones. She appeared on an episode of “The Kelly Clarkson Show” to talk about it. 

Brothers Ayman and Osama Abdeldayem ’13, founders of skate- and streetwear brand Carpet Company, opened their first brick-and-mortar store in downtown Baltimore in April. 

Dr. Sarah Cigna ’09 was featured in the documentary “The Pink Pill: Sex, Drugs and Who Has Control,” about a company’s battle to get regulatory approval of Addyi, often called the female Viagra. It’s streaming on Paramount+. She is an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology with the GW Medical Faculty Associates.

Josh Schneider ’04 competed as part of Team USA at the 2026 International Blind Hockey Series in Toronto, the premier competition for the sport. The former teacher is a full-time advocate for the sport.

Leon Smith ’01 was announced as the 2026 National Teacher of the Year on “CBS Mornings” (by co-host Gayle King ’76). He teaches Advanced Placement courses in U.S. history and African American studies and coaches the freshman basketball team at Haverford High School, northwest of Philadelphia.



Underexposed 
Run Like Shell
A University of Maryland student coaxes competitors fearlessly forward during a turtle race. While such events on campus dated back to at least the 1940s, no other details were provided with this 1979 Terrapin yearbook photo. Do you know what inspired the low-speed, high-energy affair? Or do you recognize any Terps cheering on their reptilian counterparts? Let us know at terpfeedback@umd.edu, and check the next issue for the responses and another snapshot of UMD history.—AK


From the Last Issue…
A flurry of readers wrote in to report that the shovelers featured in the Winter 2026 photo were members of the 1983 men’s lacrosse team. Curtis Rountree (left) recognized teammates Jack Francis, Kevin O’Leary, Mark Wheeler, Bill Lineberg, Mike Cavallaro, Kevin Bilger, Jean “Johno” Steffen and Steve Kirr, with their coach, Dino Mattessich, sporting the ’stache. They were clearing the turf field to practice ahead of a successful season: The Terps finished No. 3 in the country.
Ken Isman ’86 also let us know that we had incorrectly IDed the building in the background as Cambridge Hall; it’s the Atlantic Building.

Parting Shot
flying purple people mover
A Purple Line light-rail vehicle travels down Campus Drive during overnight testing this spring, the clearest indication yet of how the 16-mile transit system will look in action. The route will extend from New Carrollton in Prince George’s County to Bethesda in Montgomery County, and five of the 21 stations will be on or around the UMD campus. With direct connections to Metrorail, Amtrak and MARC, the Purple Line will provide more accessible and reliable transportation for Terps. Photo by Dylan Singleton