University of Maryland researchers and leaders met with White House representatives, crime victims and community activists on Wednesday to tackle the nationwide epidemic of gun violence at an event hosted by PROGRESS (Prevent Gun Violence: Research, Empowerment, Strategies and Solutions), a new university initiative.

A University of Maryland researcher who helped influence guidelines on masking and other measures nationwide to limit the spread of COVID-19 joined fellow experts on Thursday in publishing a new report designed to standardize how the medical and scientific fields communicate about transmission of respiratory viruses.

Regardless of your political leanings or the company you keep, the road to the 2024 presidential polls will likely be studded with conversational potholes. So how do you keep insults (or rolls) from flying at the dinner table?

Depending on where Marylanders live, their assurance of safe drinking water isn’t always crystal clear. In some Baltimore neighborhoods, it can be brown. While the city’s drinking water meets federal safety standards when it leaves municipal treatment plants, it might pick up lead, E. coli and other contaminants while flowing through a network of aging pipes before reaching a drinking glass. 

LGBTQ+ as well as Black and Latinx populations are at increased risk for using tobacco products, so youths of color who are LGBTQ+ are squarely in the sights of Big Tobacco. As a result, they experience greater tobacco-related health burdens than their non-LGBTQ+ and white peers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Black barbershops and beauty salons often serve as virtual community centers, improving not only the hairstyles but the well-being of their clients by hosting vaccine clinics health outreach activities, according to Professor Stephen B. Thomas, founding director of the University of Maryland’s Center for Health Equity and originator of the barbershop initiative known as HAIR (Health Advocates In-Reach and Research).

Without smart policymaking, banning harmful chemicals like bisphenols and phthalates—common ingredients in plastics manufacturing—can result in a game of regulatory whack-a-mole where chemicals of similar toxicity or that have not been rigorously tested take their place.

The finding comes from a wide-ranging University of Maryland study published on Wednesday in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

After a dreary winter—and brutal flu and cold season—most of us are welcoming a new kind of affliction: spring fever. Coma-like weeks on the couch, whether brought on by a super virus or the new season of “Vanderpump Rules,” may have you itching to resuscitate your fitness routine—or reluctant to emerge from hibernation.

In the hallways of a downtown Baltimore hotel, University of Maryland School of Public Health researchers and colleagues from the University of Maryland School of Medicine are breaking new ground in a first-of-its-kind study that aims to learn how the flu is transmitted. Do you get it when a person with the virus coughs on you? Touches you? Or maybe it’s floating in the air, waiting to be inhaled by a new friendly host.

It’s hard to imagine the world of science without trailblazing environmental microbiologist Rita Colwell. An expert in global infectious disease and the first female director of the National Science Foundation, Colwell has conducted seminal research on cholera that transformed our understanding of how the deadly disease behaves and spreads.