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From Battlefield to Boardroom
 Civil War photo courtesy of the Library of Congress, LC-B817- 7252
Maj. Gen. George G. Meade took command of
the Union Army of the Potomac just three days
before the Battle of Gettysburg, yet his troops
faced no crisis of leadership. In the midst of the
Civil War’s bloodiest confrontation, Meade’s
decision to call a war council and allow his top
generals to help shape strategy changed the
course of history.
A new partnership between the Robert H.
Smith School of Business and the Gettysburg
Foundation recalls the challenges facing Meade
and other battlefield commanders to provide
executives with leadership lessons that apply in
the modern workplace.
“We have so many characters to build
on,” says Greg Hanifee, executive director of
the Office of Executive Programs at the Smith
School. “It’s an emotional experience. If people
internalize what happened at Gettysburg, they
gain a new perspective on their own challenges
and obstacles.”
The customizable “In the Footsteps of
Leaders” curriculum builds on a 4-year-old
foundation program by adding the expertise of
business school faculty. Smith sessions last from
two days to a week and the content depends on
goals—including improving teamwork, conflict
management and innovation—identified by each
client. All programs start with a seven- to eighthour
battlefield tour, followed by a chance to
tour the museum and visitor center, as well as
the national cemetery where Abraham Lincoln
delivered the Gettysburg Address. Participants
also reflect on the lessons from the classroom.
Leadership Program Manager Sue Boardman,
a licensed battlefield guide, helps Smith faculty
determine which leaders to highlight. On a
given day, she might talk about Confederate
Gen. Robert E. Lee, who failed to adapt his
communication style when two of his top three
commanders were replaced and missed an
opportunity to gain the high ground, or Union
Col. Joshua Chamberlain, whose empathy
convinced potential mutineers to remain
committed to the cause.
Boardman says witnessing these decisions as
a corporate unit brings co-workers together in a
new way: “They’re a ‘regiment’ by the time they
march across Pickett’s Charge.”
James M. Sullivan ’81, senior vice president of
IT solutions provider Force 3, brought more than
20 employees to Gettysburg in 2009 and 2010 to
study strategic thinking, leadership style, team
building and communication.
“Making parallels to how these same
processes affect our business environment was
an extremely enlightening and effective learning
experience,” he says.—KM
Tracking Biodiversity for Fun and Science
Photo illustration by Catherine Nichols
Maryland researchers seek to capitalize
on human nature in order to provide a
detailed accounting of Mother Nature.
Faculty and graduate students
in the College of Information
Studies, Maryland’s iSchool, and the
Department of Computer Science
are developing Biotracker, a National
Science Foundation-funded project that
encourages everyday citizens to snap
digital photos and collect other data on
flora and fauna worldwide.
Assistant Professor Derek Hansen
says Biotracker will help merge “people’s
innate desire to hunt down and collect
things” with the precise rules used in
computer calculations, called algorithms.
He compared it to geocaching, a game
that uses hand-held global positioning
devices to find hidden objects, except
Biotracker has the added “cache” of
benefiting science.
“We want to develop technology-based
motivational tools that inspire
people to collect information useful for
other scientists in identifying new species,
or in tracking the migration patterns of
known ones,” he says.
The Maryland team expects the unique
data from Biotracker to be incorporated
into the Smithsonian Institution’s
Encyclopedia of Life, an online repository
that aims to document all of the Earth’s
estimated 2 million living
organisms.
Plans call for
testing a prototype
of Biotracker in
India, where the
population is
already inclined
to use technology
and a rich diversity of
plants and animals can
offer troves of information.
—TV
New Center to Examine the New America
 U.S. table-and-chair illustration by Brian G. Payne
Nearly 250 years after this nation
was founded as an immigrant society,
the latest U.S. census shows that
immigrants and their children made
up three-fourths of the last decade’s
population growth.
A new university initiative, the
Center for the History of the New
America, will explore this phenomenon,
looking at who we are by examining
who we were.
“Understanding the United States
as a nation of immigrants is critical to
any appreciation of the new America,”
says Ira Berlin, distinguished university
professor of history and co-founder of
the project.
The center hopes to bring in
scholars, students and policymakers
from around the world interested in
how a resurgence of American immigration
interconnects with the underlying
currents of global social change,
Berlin says.
Closer to home, an array of
immigrants in Prince George’s
County—with large local communities
from El Salvador, Nigeria, the
Philippines and Ethiopia, to name but
a few—offers ample opportunity to
gather a rich library of oral histories
and other data, says Julie Greene, professor
of history who helped launch
the center.
Greene expects the project to
draw strong interest from across
academic disciplines, with proposed
graduate fellowships attracting not
only history majors, but also researchers
and scholars from disciplines as
diverse as anthropology, public health,
economics and more to get involved.
“Looking at how Americans relate
to one another and how society should
function in a way that treats everyone
with respect and dignity is important,”
she says. —TV
Off & Running
 Running shoe courtesy of Jae Kun Shim
When kinesiology Assistant Professor Jae
Kun Shim and research fellow Prabhav Saraswat
go on their daily runs, they’re thinking about work
with every step. Can a better sneaker prevent
running injuries? And why aren’t the specialized
athletic shoes already on the market doing that?
The answer, says Saraswat, lies in research
that goes beyond improving performance to focus
on shoe-related injuries. He and Shim are doing
such work through a collaboration with athletic
apparel powerhouse Under Armour, founded by
Kevin Plank ’96.
Through a $100,000 gift, the company is
sponsoring Saraswat’s two-year fellowship. Under
Armour donated another $489,000 in shoes and
equipment. Shim’s Neuromechanics Laboratory
received $100,000 from the university’s Maryland
Industrial Partnerships and a total of $90,000
from the Department of Kinesiology, Division of
Research and School of Public Health.
Shim says other companies in the $3.1 billion
running shoe industry have approached him.
“But Under Armour appreciates the
biomechanics and physiology of it,” he says.
As part of the research, 100 test subjects
wearing different types of shoes designed
by Shim and Under Armour dashed down
a 25-meter wooden runway with 12
infrared cameras recording their
every move. Sensors in the floor
captured the impact. The results
created 3-D images and other data
for Shim’s team to study.
His lab colleagues come from
mechanical engineering, electrical
engineering, robotics and biomechanics,
and there’s an orthopedic surgeon in the mix,
too. Shim, whose background includes computer
science and engineering, says the range of
disciplines creates richer research.
The goal: sneakers that accommodate runners’
different foot striking patterns. Shim and Saraswat
would be among the technology’s beneficiaries:
“I’ve gone through a lot of the knee pain and shin
splints,” says Saraswat.
—MAB
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