UMB–UMBC Partnership

UMBC and the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) have a long-standing partnership that goes back several decades. 

Shared Organizational Infrastructure

  • The University of Maryland Graduate School, Baltimore (UMGSB) Graduate Council is composed of representatives from both UMBC and UMB.
  • The UMB veterinarian serves on UMBC’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee.
  • The universities offer their investigators an institutional authorization agreement to allow a single IRB to be the approver of record for a collaborative project.
  • Within IMET, which houses researchers from UMB, UMBC, and UMCES, UMB provides all compliance oversight and UMBC manages the facilities.

Shared Degree Programs

Because both universities operate under the auspices of the University of Maryland Graduate School, Baltimore, there are a number of joint programs that take advantage of the strengths of both campuses:

  • The Graduate Program in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology is an intercampus doctoral program consisting of faculty and departments on both campuses, with research foci including: Structural Biology (Crystallography and NMR Spectroscopy), Gene Expression & Regulation, Cardiac Muscle Biology, DNA Repair & Cancer Cell Biology, Fluorescence Spectroscopy, and Viral DNA Packaging.
  • The Ph.D. Biostatistics track in the UMBC Statistics Ph.D. program affords students the opportunity to gain hands‐on experience in collaborative research at the School of Medicine and the Greenebaum Cancer Center.
  • The joint Doctoral Program in Gerontology provides an interdisciplinary and integrative perspective on the process of human aging and the experiences of growing old. UMB’s professional schools (Dental, Law, Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy, and Social Work) and UMBC’s departments (Economics, Public Policy, Psychology, and Sociology & Anthropology) combine to make this mission possible by offering three tracks of study: epidemiology of aging; policy for the elderly; and social, cultural, and behavioral sciences.
  • The School of Social Work at the two campuses work together to offer under-graduate degrees from UMBC and master’s and doctoral degrees from UMB.
  • Marine Estuarine Environmental Sciences (MEES) is an inter-institutional graduate program including UMBC, UMB, and other USM institutions. MEES uses an interdisciplinary approach to train students to engage in scientific discovery, integration, and application to generate new knowledge and to solve environmental problems.
  • The Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science offers research and training opportunities in neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience and computational neuroscience with internationally-renowned faculty who interact among three campuses: UMB, UMBC, and UMCP. Each campus offers graduate training leading to a Ph.D. degree.   

Shared Research Facilities

  • The Center for Brain Imaging Research (CBIR) is a research-designated functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) facility located at UMB’s Maryland Psychiatric Research Center (MPRC) on the Spring Grove Hospital campus, across the street from UMBC. The facility is a joint investment by the two universities and is actively used by faculty and students from both campuses and at all levels. The facility went online in 2012 and the first year included several seed-funded projects, with support from both universities, to allow faculty to get initial results and become competitive for extramural funding.
  • The Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology (IMET) includes faculty and students from both universities working side‐by‐side at the Columbus Center, located at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. IMET is home to an impressive array of shared instruments, including the Aquaculture Research Center (ARC) and an extremophile scale‐up facility.
  • UMB’s NMR Core Facility includes a 950 MHz Bruker Advance III NMR Spectrometer, which was purchased with a shared instrumentation grant in collaboration between UMB (PI David Weber), UMBC (Mike Summers), UMCP (David Fushman), and 32 additional users from the three institutions. The spectrometer is located in a space where tight regulation of temperature and humidity are maintained. The spectrometer is connected to an uninterrupted power supply so experiments and calculations are never stopped inadvertently due to power surges or power outages. It is mounted on vibration isolation posts, and the accompanying digital consoles are equipped with four frequency channels, pulsed field gradients, modern temperature control units, and all the hardware and software necessary for completing modern NMR experiments.

UMB–UMBC Research and Innovation Partnership Seed Grant Program

  • The Research and Innovation Partnership Seed Grant Program was active between 2013 and 2018 to:
    • Foster creative teams of investigators working across disciplinary boundaries and campuses;
    • Support new research foci to pursue future health care improvements and/or technologies; and
    • Stimulate submission of innovative research proposals to federal, public or private funding agencies.
  • The program was divided into two tracks, a seed track and a challenge track, which differ in the maximum award period and award size. Accordingly, this program supported partnerships of varying degrees of maturity and scale.
  • A total of 14 collaborative teams, representing over 30 faculty from both institutions have received support under this program.
  • The UMB–UMBC Partnership Seed Program was superseded by the ICTR ATIP Pilot Grant Program in 2019.