ARCS Foundation, Metro Washington Chapter (MWC) November 2023 Newsletter |
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Nov 12: ARCS friends activity, 1-2:30 pm
Nov 14: ARCS-MWC Neil DeGrasse Tyson event, 7:30-10 pm
Dec 7: Holiday Party, 6:30-9:30 pm
Feb 3: Winter Member Meeting
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We thank our ARCS-MWC members and guests who joined us on Oct 26 for the special occasion of honoring our scholars at the annual Scholar Award Reception (SAR) at the National Academy of Science. This event, a highlight during our 55th anniversary year, was certainly a special occasion to celebrate scholarship, innovation, and research. The event brimmed with enthusiasm and gratitude as we acknowledged our donors, members and academic partners, and celebrated our commitment to advancing STEM education and research.
Over 100 guests attended, including our sixteen 2023-2024 scholars, representatives of our five university partners, donors, potential members, friends and family. We were so pleased to have ARCS National President Beth Wainwright join us. We appreciate Charlotte Knight’s donation of 10 tickets used by Hillary Sparrell, a physics teachers at Wakefield High School, and her students. Hillary shared that her students found it amazing to meet scholars and learn about their research activities. Thank you Charlotte for inspiring future scholars!
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We thank Duncan Sparrell of sFractal for sponsoring the SAR event and for George Washington University for sponsoring the pre-reception dinner for the scholars.
A special thanks to Miriam Erikson and Anne Wingo who have led University Relations and the SAR for the past six years. We greatly appreciate their dedication and numerous hours of volunteer service as they welcome our newest scholar class.
A special highlight for the scholars was the prerecorded inspirational message from Dr. Jessica Meir. Thank you to Elli Nesbitt for contacting Dr. Mier and coordinating her video presentation.
Finally, an event like the SAR would not be possible without everyone’s commitment and hard work. We have a fabulous SAR team.
Building on all the positive energy from the SAR, we encourage everyone to come to the annual Holiday Party at Holly Coyne’s home on Dec 7.
~Julie Hohl and Patty Sparrell, ARCS-MWC co-presidents
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Our ARCS-MWC Holiday Party is Thurs, Dec 7 from 6:30-9:30 pm at the home of Jim and Holly Coyne. Valet parking will be available.
Wear your festive business or cocktail attire and join your fellow MWC members, spouses and guests. Tickets are $150 each and include a buffet dinner and drinks.
Click here by Nov 24 to RSVP. Questions? Contact Mary Jo Ruane at (703) 965-9098.
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Join us, in-person or virtually, for our next ARCS friends activity— a mixology and cooking class on Sun, Nov 12 from 1-2:30 pm at the home of Julie Hohl. Members will demonstrate a flower arrangement, the new ARCS 55th anniversary cocktail, holiday appetizers, main courses, and dessert. These will be great to entertain family and friends during the holiday season!
To RSVP or for more info, click here by Nov 8 to email Mary Jo Ruane. Be sure to indicate whether attending in-person or virtually. Bring a friend too. We will send the zoom link and recipes closer to the date.
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On Sun, Sept 24 at the home of Steve and Charlotte Knight, tasty wines from France, Italy, Napa-Sonoma, and Virginia flowed through the glasses of ARCS friends at the fall wine tasting event. A cool rainy autumn day was perfect to gather and add to our knowledge of the vine. As Dr. Claudia Benack said, “There is so much to learn about the vineyards, complex aromas, and flavors on the pallet.”
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Everyone enjoyed sharing “sipping wine memories” and wonderful conversation. And that made for some happy ARCS friends. |
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Members, potential members, donors and scholars and representatives of our five university partners attended our Scholar Awards Reception (SAR) on Thurs, Oct 26 at the National Academy of Sciences Building. By all accounts the event was wonderful. We hope to have a link to the gallery of pictures soon. In the meantime, here are a couple.
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As we celebrate our chapter’s 55th anniversary, we highlight Karen Meyer’s ongoing commitment of 50 years to ARCS-MWC!
She joined in 1973 after Lana Yarymovych (you read about Lana in our October newsletter) and June Sanger—two very good friends who both knew Barbara Arnold—kept encouraging Karen to do so. Lana was Karen’s wonderful friend down the street. Karen's mom was good friends with June, and Karen's father and June's husband (Captain Sanger, U.S. Navy) were both engineers on the Polaris missile system.
Karen stayed with ARCS-MWC for three reasons:
- She joined an educational group because she had four young children and a degree in education.
- She was proud that the U.S. space program was being strengthened by ARCS MWC Scholars.
- The women in ARCS-MWC were wonderful – willing to work hard for a cause and still have FUN!
Some of Karen’s proudest achievements and fondest memories in ARCS-MWC included:
- Creating early chapter newsletters, copying them, and personally handing out the hardcopies!
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Karen found it rewarding to work with the schools and the Scholars as VP, University Relations (UR)! She really enjoyed reading the applications and seeing the Scholars’ accomplishments!
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Karen loved the annual Scholar Awards Receptions, feeling she had made a “tiny" contribution in helping the chapter’s Scholars succeed!
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Karen also said that the chapter members went on fantastic trips! She still has a vivid memory of their trip to the Strategic Air Command headquarters in Omaha, courtesy of Barbara Arnold! They were taken up in a KC-135, an aerial refueling tanker aircraft, during the trip. It had no seats so many of the ARCS-MWC members played bridge on the floor! Karen and Cheryl Calio were the only two members small enough to fit in the tanker’s bay and pretend they were steering the tanker next to a plane being refueled.
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Karen also drove with Lana from Maryland to ARCS-MWC chapter meetings in Virginia. Lana was the navigator and had maps all over her lap!
In closing, Karen said she would like to remind fellow ARCS-MWC members to always keep the chapter’s mission in our hearts and minds! She said it is easy to lose track of the mission given how busy we all are but the mission should always be the main priority. She emphasized that ARCS-MWC is a very unique organization because of the millions of dollars the members have raised over the years for this cause!
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Steven Lamp - McNichols Family Foundation Scholar
1st Year Scholar, PhD Candidate, Computer Science
University of Virginia
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Research:
To evaluate novel machine-learning (ML) techniques to detect autonomous bots online, one needs to accurately mimic the digital artifacts created by human’s behavior. This research creates human-like responses by analyzing a real human's digital behavior, takes those behavioral traits and augments an AI control unit to utilize a computer in a realistic way.
Describe the expected benefit of your research to society:
Global infrastructures from dams to bank vaults are linked to the internet and are bombarded by autonomous bots attempting to compromise critical areas vital to normal operations. Creating defensive measures against these bots is imperative to ensuring
infrastructures’ security. To determine which techniques are effective, we must evaluate them. Evaluating a defense when human behavior is involved is an open problem, due to the fact that human behavior is extremely difficult to simulate realistically. Therefore, this research will deliver a stronger method for evaluating defensive techniques by providing realistic human behaviors to an isolated testbed environment, ensuring our global infrastructure remains resilient to cyber attacks. DOLOS (named for the greek spirit of trickery) focuses on
providing realistic human-like computer operation mimics for an accurate testbed of a real world cyber defensive situation. DOLOS mimics behavior similar to a real human sitting at a computer desk. Hence a single DOLOs control unit is called a mimic. The mimic’s
AI-enabled behaviors include: realistic mouse movements, web browsing, email and document editing, and operating system interactions such as moving or copying files. The mimics can be tailored to fit behaviors indicative of different online environments, such as a corporate office or an army base. DOLOS is the first of its kind to provide realistic human-like behavior of a computer's operation to an isolated testbed environment, enabling faster
development and evaluation of novel cyber defensive techniques, ensuring our global infrastructure is resilient to cyber attacks.
How will an ARCS award might benefit your research:
The ARCS Fellowship will help support my research in several ways. It will provide me with the ability to travel and visit academic scholars, industry and government research laboratories, and attend relevant scientific conferences to disseminate the result of
my research. The fellowship will also help provide support to mentor and involve undergraduate students interested in participating in the DOLOS cybersecurity research project.
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Sadia Nourin - Sparrell Family Scholar
Undergraduate Scholar, Computer Science & Finance
University of Maryland
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Research:
Sadia’s rsearch focuses on measuring and evading nation-state censorship to enable free and open communication on the Internet. She seeks to find ways to measure censorship in small countries, which are often overlooked by the censorship community, without the use of volunteers or vantage points.
Describe the expected benefit of your research to society:
Nation-state censorship threatens the free and open communication of many countries in the world and is a tool oppressive regimes use to silence activists who oppose the government, curb political dissent during protests, and ban “immoral” content deemed inappropriate for citizens. This censorship is often extensive on the Internet, in which state actors enact strict filtering policies to control and regulate all information and communication online. To grant Internet freedom to millions of people under such regimes, researchers have been measuring and circumventing censorship, but they often only focus on large nation-states such as China, Iran, and Russia. Smaller nations with low Internet penetration rates and small populations are often overlooked when it comes to censorship research, even though many employ censorship as extensively, if not more, as powerful nations and may have harsher laws surrounding the access of censored material and censorship circumvention tools. My research aims to fill this gap in the censorship research community by measuring and circumventing the censorship systems of small countries. I follow a longitudinal approach to discover patterns in censorship that may arise and fall, as studying censorship at a single point in time does not give us the full picture. During times of political unrest, state actors can ramp up censorship, causing previously discovered censorship evasion strategies to fail and more domains on the Internet to be censored. However, soon afterwards, state actors can lax their censorship, perhaps due to “election” season, reversing any previous findings.
Community Service, Contributions to DEI, Volunteer Work:
My intent on impactful research that serves a greater good can be traced back to my Honors College seminars. I was forced to delve into uncomfortable topics on how immigration has forced different marginalized communities into oppression through U.S. history. I was challenged to understand how metropolitan cities became a hierarchy system, where those at the bottom of the ladder were not able to enjoy even lush, green parks. At the end of my seminars, I created a plan that would help solve these modern-day issues, focusing on immigration reform execution and green city transformation. I carry this resolve to help with social justice even in my research today.
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Sarah Neshat, last year’s ARCS-MWC Endowment Scholar, was recently named a Siebel Scholar. The annual award recognizes the world's top graduate students from leading institutions of bioengineering, computer science, energy science, and business.
Sarah, a first-generation college graduate, completed her undergraduate studies at Northeastern University with three six-month co-ops in pharma, academia, and biotech. She is a recipient of graduate scholarships from the NSF, GEM Consortium, ARCS-MWC Endowment, and P.E.O. Her PhD thesis at JHU focuses on non-viral gene delivery immunotherapies for oncology and autoimmune diseases, thus far resulting in 11 papers, three patents, and over eight conference presentations; her co-advisers are Jordan Green, professor and vice chair for Research and Translation in the Department of Biomedical Engineering; and Joshua Doloff, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, materials science and engineering, and oncology.
Passionate about STEM education access, Sarah co-founded the JHU BME Application Assistance Program, aiding underrepresented students in pursuing BME PhD programs. She instructed the inaugural Biomedical Engineering Innovation course at Baltimore's all-girls Roland Park Country School and mentored five students in the lab, including a Coppin State student via the Hopkins-HBCU BME Pathway program. She actively contributed to the BME department by serving on executive boards for Extramural Development in Graduate Education and Nucleate. Beyond JHU, she is a senior fellow for Blackbird Laboratories, a Baltimore-based accelerator.
Click here for more info on the JHU Siebel scholars.
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Watch this space for updates from the ARCS-MWC councils.
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P.O. Box 60868
10221 River Road
Potomac, MD 20859-0868
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