The University of Maryland Strategic Partnership: MPowering the State (MPower) today announced the appointment of seven professors from the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) and the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP) as 2025 MPower Professors.  

Two of those professors, Shuo Chen, PhD and Julie Dunning Hotopp, PhD, are on faculty at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM). Dr. Chen, is a professor of Epidemiology and Public Health at UMSOM and also serves as the director of biostatistics and data science at both the University of Maryland Institute for Health Computing and the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. Dr. Hotopp is a professor of microbiology and immunology and a scientist at the Institute for Genome Sciences at UMSOM.

To be considered for the MPower Professorship, faculty must demonstrate collaboration on strategic research that would be unattainable or difficult to achieve by UMB or UMCP acting independently of one another and must embrace the mission of MPower — to collectively strengthen and serve the state of Maryland and its citizens.  

MPower Professors will each receive $150,000, allocated over three years, to apply to their salary or to support supplemental research activities. These funds recognize, enable and support strong collaborations between faculty in the joint research enterprise between UMCP and UMB.  

Read more about the new MPower professorships here.