The Clark School Celebrates Women and Multiracial Engineers and Engineering Professionals
Join us this March as we celebrate Women’s History Month and Multiracial Heritage Month. We are proud to highlight the impact made by members of our Maryland engineering community on our campus and country. Please share these and all the stories of our community members, and participate in campus-wide activities: The university’s Office of Multicultural Involvement and Community Advocacy (MICA) coordinates a calendar of events to commemorate national Women’s History Month and a calendar of events to commemorate national Multiracial Heritage Month.
Virgin Islands born and Maryland raised, Danielle C. Gittens ’01 P.E. has always had a passion for construction—first as a teen with a knack for building household items, then as an engineering student studying construction management at the Clark School, and now as the owner of Brewington Management Company. Gittens founded the program and construction management firm, which specializes in healthcare, commercial, government, affordable housing, and heavy construction, in Upper Marlboro in 2005. With a solid foundation in both construction management and engineering, Gittens works with owners, architects, and contractors to ensure all make good on their time, quality, and budgets for successful builds. In 2024, Brewington Management Company was recognized as a Top 100 MBE by the Capital Region MSDC for driving economic growth, creating opportunities, and making invaluable community contributions, and received a Certificate of Recognition from Prince George’s County Economic Development Corporation. “I see my role as trying to establish our company as the subject matter expert in this area of Maryland,” she says. “We’re hitting our stride at 20 years.” Among Gittens’ most formative experiences at the Clark School and Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering was her senior research project in project site management—comparing research and field management procedures—taught by John Cable, who retired in 2022 after founding and directing for many years the Project Management Center for Excellence. Twenty-some years later, Gittens finds herself teaching the same concepts to her students at Frederick Community College. “The Clark School is where it all started. Now I’m the subject matter expert,” she says. “Talk about a full circle moment.” In addition to her UMD coursework, Gittens was involved in campus activities that helped her develop the confidence she exhibits today. She became a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, served the Black Student Union, and worked at Nyumburu Cultural Center. Today, she pays forward her opportunities to the next generation. She especially enjoys mentoring and served as a panelist at the 2024 Women of the Clark School event. “I’m just as passionate about this work now as I was in college,” she says. “I’m proud of the industry we’re building.”
For Aileen Naoko Hentz, program director for academic and student services in the Department of Aerospace Engineering, her heritage is written in her name. Her middle name, Naoko, is Hentz’s mother’s first name, which Hentz passed down to her own daughter. Born in Okinawa to a Japanese mother and American father, Hentz grew up in a military family, settling in her father’s home state of Wisconsin, where she became a first-generation college student. When it came time to pursue a doctorate, the student affairs professional focused her research on the impact of appearance on multiracial identity development in college students. “Being someone who identifies as mixed and having been misidentified most of my life, there’s a lot of personal experience that informs my thinking,” she says. She finds her background helps her connect with students. “Not only am I mixed race and mixed ethnicity, but I’m coming from an immigrant parent, first-generation background. That’s a lot of intersecting identities—and I think they all give me an edge.” Arriving at the aerospace engineering department in 2011, Hentz oversees student success for undergraduate and graduate students, from their first steps on campus through graduation to their alum experience. From recruitment to academic and career advising, Hentz loves seeing the students change over time. From fewer than 400 undergraduates in 2011, her charge stands at nearly 650 undergraduate students today. Through floods of emails and long days, her supportive team and the students themselves make it all worthwhile, Hentz says. “I’m making a difference. That’s what matters.” In recent years Hentz developed the Junior Endeavor Transfer (JET) program, an initiative that has increased transfer student recruitment and retention by providing a pathway whereby participating Maryland community college transfer students can graduate from UMD in two years, instead of the typical three; the program was expanded to serve the entire Clark School as Summer Pathways. Hentz is proud of her part in the success of transfer students, many of whom come from backgrounds underrepresented in engineering. “We’ve had success getting our JET program students to go on to graduate school,” she says. “That’s a real win.”
Shock was the prevailing reaction of junior chemical and biomolecular engineering (CHBE) major Caroline King to learning that she had received the Clark Opportunity Transfer Scholars (COTS) program scholarship. Having earned her associate’s degree from Anne Arundel Community College, the Annapolis native was ready for the next step in becoming an engineer. But she worried about paying rent and tuition as a UMD student. “The scholarship was the biggest weight off my chest,” she says. “Now I can live on campus. It’s given me a lot of freedom to take advantage of the amazing resources at UMD.” King has used her time outside of classes to engage in research in the lab run by Hannah Zierden, an assistant professor in the CHBE department, that aims to engineer therapies to prevent preterm birth, foster healthy fetal programming, and improve maternal outcomes. King’s research, led by CHBE doctoral student Alyssa Petersen, is focused on isolating, characterizing, and experimenting on a protein corona, which is a coating that forms around nanoparticles. If the researchers can engineer the protein corona correctly, King explains, it could help with effective drug delivery targeting preventive care for preterm birth, an understudied scientific topic. This semester, she is excited to submit the lab’s first paper about the protein corona research project. “Right now, there are no drugs used for preventive care for preterm birth,” King notes. “It’s cool to be doing groundbreaking work and to be a part of something bigger than I am.” Being in a lab that’s focused on women’s health has been especially fascinating and rewarding for King. She feels lucky to have found strong women mentors and professors in the department to look up to—from Zierden to Adjunct Assistant Professor Daphne Fuentevilla, who taught King’s summer course in thermodynamics. Currently applying for summer internships, the student researcher has her eyes on the horizon. With an end goal of consulting in the renewable energy or biotech or biopharmaceuticals space, King looks forward to making her mark by helping people. “You can tangibly make a difference in engineering,” she says.
Even before earning a Clark Opportunity Transfer Scholars (COTS) program scholarship and coming to UMD, senior mechanical engineering (ME) major Michael Sipper had already parlayed his passion for engineering and big tech into two pivotal internships. As an ME intern for the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he helped design and model novel components to help facilitate x-ray experiments. Later, as a product design engineering intern for Apple, his work for the Softgoods team—which deals with iPhone cases and accessories—yielded him four patents. Family has contributed greatly to Sipper’s “unorthodox” college path, playing a major role in his outlook on engineering—and life. Born to an American father and Chinese mother, Sipper’s mother was the only one from her impoverished family to come to the U.S. for college. When his father died (Sipper was just nine years old), it put a lot of financial strain on the family. He says navigating financial adversity early in life made him both scrappy and intentional about pursuing a career that also allows him to follow his conscience. “Product design is fascinating, because you can have such a big impact,” he said. “Your decision to use a specific material can impact the environment, so you’re conscious of the ethics that go into making design decisions. I thought that was really cool.” In addition to his coursework and involvement in the COTS program, Sipper is involved with UMD student startup accelerator Hinman CEOs to build a new social networking app: Tap'dIn is a geo-based app that offers a way to easily create and execute plans with connections in your area to help close the gap between online networking and real-life interactions. Sipper says its goal is to facilitate building meaningful relationships and fostering a vibrant local community. He credits his ME background for his approach. “Whether you’re doing a stress analysis for a structure or solving a social issue in the world, you have to have a rigorous approach to problem-solving,” he says. “You have to be methodical.”
A middle school robotics course piqued Alexandria Slokan’s interest in engineering. High school courses in biomedical science led her to the bioengineering major at the Clark School, after completing her associates degree at the Community College of Baltimore County. Grateful for the Clark Opportunity Transfer Scholars Program, the senior now looks forward to graduation. Open to possibilities, she is considering either pursuing graduate school or working in biomechanics, for example with prosthetics or artificial limbs. “Anything that requires me to design something to help others, I’d be pleased with,” she says. As for long-term goals? “If I could work in the bioengineering sector of the National Institutes of Health, I would be very stoked.” Slokan counts her research opportunities among her most valuable Clark School experiences. The summer after her junior year, she conducted research at the Bioinspired Advanced Manufacturing (BAM) Laboratory led by Associate Professor and Fischell Institute Fellow Ryan D. Sochol of the Fischell Department of Bioengineering. Slokan’s work on microtubules that could navigate through human blood vessels contributed to research to improve drug delivery. She is also proud to have served on a couple related literature reviews. “The Clark School provides a lot of opportunities to research in a safe learning environment,” she says, “where I can benefit educationally but still contribute to the science.” Coming from a “less-fortunate background,” Slokan grew up learning to fix household items (most recently her family’s washing machine) out of necessity. She developed independence, problem-solving skills, and a knack for working with her hands—all valuable to the engineering design process. Lately, she enjoys creating designs in the woodworking room; last winter, she built a mechanical toy hand that wiggles its fingers, using CAD software and a 3D printer at Terrapin Works. Outside of coursework, research, and “tinkering” with projects, she is part of the boxing club. “It’s a great way to stay active,” she says, “and meet a lot of people with different interests.”
For fire protection engineering (FPE) senior Christine Welton, Maryland Engineering is a family affair: Her older sister earned her degree in civil and environmental engineering in 2023. As luck would have it, Welton had been looking over her sister’s shoulder during an online FPE course, which seemed interesting to the highschooler who enjoyed robotics. Add to that the fact that Welton had always been a huge Maryland Athletics fan, and UMD became “a no-brainer.” In and out of the classroom, Welton brings enthusiasm to her work in FPE. Her favorite class? Intro to Life Safety Analysis taught by Ken Isman, the first endowed clinical professor in FPE, who had a real-life application (and a story) for every concept covered. (Popular among students, Isman retired in 2024.) Welton’s internships with Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) gave her experience in the lab, where she conducted ignition testing and smoke analysis, and in the field, where she assisted in fire investigations; after graduation the certified engineer in training will go to work in a two-year program with rotations for NAVSEA. Serving as a member of the Society of Fire Protection Engineers and an FPE ambassador, Welton loves visiting middle and high schools to spread the word about fire protection engineering and the department through hands-on experiments, including the always-popular fire tornado simulation. Fire protection engineering is “pretty niche, but so in-demand,” she says. “We definitely need more fire protection engineers.” Having attended an all-girls high school, Welton says she felt sure of herself and her opinions when entering UMD; in turn, she encourages everyone in the room to share their ideas. Outside of FPE, she is an officer for the UMD concrete canoe team, a Bible study leader for the Catholic Student Center, and, when she’s not cheering on the UMD Athletics teams, a member of an intramural volleyball team of FPE seniors—which logged its first playoff win last year. “We’re a close-knit class,” says Welton. “I’ve made some of my best friends in FPE.”
First-year doctoral student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) and Clark Doctoral Fellow Aoife Zuercher found her passion for science as a young child, eager to understand how things work. In high school, she discovered her ambition to pursue research. Fast forward to her junior year of college, studying chemistry and mathematics at Ohio University, and Zuercher’s experience interning for NASA’s Langley Research Center—working on batteries for electric aircraft—would point her to advanced studies at MSE. Working with Distinguished University Professor Eric Wachsman, who also directs the Maryland Energy Innovation Institute, Zuercher studies the processes behind solid-state batteries for electric vehicles—from in-lab materials synthesis to characterization, battery fabrication and testing. She’s passionate about her field and considering career pathways in the private and government sectors. “I am excited every day to go into the lab because I know that my work will have positive implications on the next generation of energy storage, which is an important need for the use of renewable energy,” she says. She credits her fellow scholars in Wachsman’s group and in MSE for her positive experience at the Clark School, and often finds herself inspired by the female faculty in the department. Outside of work, she’s a member of the Materials Science Graduate Society and was part of the Rose of Tralee International Festival, last year, an organization that celebrates Irish women around the world and encourages the participation of girls in STEM. The daughter of an Irish mother, Zuercher’s family also has a history with engineering—her grandfather being one of the inventors of the automated bowling pin setter, she says. Her advice to fellow women in engineering is to be confident in their expertise. “Nobody knows your own research better than you,” she says. “With that confidence in yourself, always still be willing to learn from others that have their own unique knowledge and insight.” Meet more members of our community.
Related Articles: March 3, 2025 Prev Next |
