Featured Faculty Member: Dr. Roberta Sabin

On this particular Sunday afternoon, she maneuvers the boat into the mouth of the Patapsco, where it meets the Chesapeake Bay. She points out the Key Bridge behind us, Sparrows Point to the left, and the Bay Bridge in the distance to the right. Next week, she will participate as a volunteer in a Marriage Encounter session. Next month, she will be explaining database structures to her graduate students. Much as the boat is at the nexus of waterways, Roberta Sabin is at the nexus of a diverse and most interesting life.

Dr. Sabin's altruistic side may have been influenced "far in the past" by her experiences as a religions sister. She earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics at the College of Notre Dame and a master's in mathematics from Villanova. After teaching high school mathematics and chemistry for thirteen years and earning two additional master's degrees, she transitioned to Coppin State University, then on to Loyola in 1986. She was the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UMBC. The topic of her 1990 dissertation was metacyclic codes, a type of algebraic error-correcting codes.

It was during sabbatical work at the National Institutes of Health in 1996 that Dr. Sabin got into the area of information retrieval. That year, she helped build a tool to extract information from the NIH GenBank and present it graphically. Her work in information retrieval has continued with projects at NSA in text processing. Some of her work involved the Enron e-mail messages that contributed to the energy giant's historic downfall. Her most recently completed, NSA-funded work has been a research project creating and using the Computer-Mediated Communication Corpus - correlated data in six different media. Studies using the data include attempts to identify the gender of the author, characteristics of the different genres, and the identity of the specific author.

Dr. Sabin has long been involved in tutoring and outreach to underserved communities. She participates in marriage preparation and a Marriage Encounter circle - an activity in which couples better their communication. Pressed why a couple should engage in a Marriage Encounter circle, Dr. Sabin authoritatively points to the "nice desserts" that are served.

Her favorite subject to teach? Data structures. It contains "enough math to be interesting," and the "algorithmic underpinnings are cool." Once her students understand data structures, she points out, they are then able to "code something significant."

After she retires, Dr. Sabin does not plan to merely sail into the sunset. She would like to user her technical skills in a prison or outreach program for those who are economically disadvangated. her husband, Edward, is a sociologist who is involved as a volunteer and college instructor in Maryland prisons. He helps facilitate "Alternatives to Violence," a group-oriented program run by the prisoners themselves. Now employed part-time for Baltimore Department of Social Services, he likes to work on a sailboat he built from a concrete hull. It's docked in the Sabins' front "yard," Bodkin Creek. Edward has sailed the Bay for over thirty years - always with the same, usually cooperative first mate!