Director's Message to UMIACS September 2025

As announced earlier in the summer, Mihai Pop completed his term as the director of UMIACS on June 30, having served in that role since 2018. I'm deeply grateful to Mihai for his steadfast leadership of the institute. As interim director, I look forward to working with faculty, students, and staff affiliated with UMIACS as we continue to advance cutting-edge computational science.

UMIACS was chartered in late 1984 and began operations in 1985. This year marks 40 years of research, scholarship, and innovation that is based on interdisciplinary teamwork backed by powerful computing resources.

The institute has grown significantly in the past four decades. We currently have 120-plus faculty from 16 departments on the UMD campus that bring in an average of $30 million each year in research funding.

Our work is driven by unrelenting passion to make new discoveries and develop new technologies that will have a positive impact on science and society.

This month’s newsletter highlights those efforts, including a feature story on UMIACS postdoc Kyle Brumfield, working closely with Distinguished University Professor Rita Colwell. Their team is using DNA sequencing and other technologies to track and help mitigate waterborne pathogens. 

Other work led by Heng Huang is combining advanced AI techniques with massive streams of environmental data to improve how we forecast, track, and manage dangerous wildfires in the U.S.

I also encourage you to read the article on five undergraduates who worked in our TRAILS institute over the summer with members of the blind and low-vision community to develop a mobile app that adds verification layers to AI responses to make them more reliable and trustworthy.

These are just a few examples of positive outcomes from UMIACS research, with many more to come. Keep up the great work, and I hope to see many of you around the institute this fall.

Best,

Andrew Childs, Interim UMIACS Director