Hailing from a lineage of educators, Maryland Smith’s Zeinab Karake always believed she’d find a career in the classroom. To her, teaching isn’t just a profession, it’s a calling. Originally from Lebanon, Karake described how teaching has shaped her family’s lives. Her great-grandfather was the first teacher in their village and of her six brothers and sisters, four of them became teachers as well. In that sense, Karake says, her career path and future were set early on.

The U.S. military’s abrupt Afghanistan withdrawal has left social media companies facing a complex new set of policy decisions. Maryland Smith’s Jui Ramaprasad said the subsequent Taliban takeover is especially problematic for the likes of Facebook and YouTube, which categorize the Taliban as “a dangerous organization” in accordance with the group being sanctioned as a terrorist organization under U.S. law. Facebook, for example, applies the policy when it shuts down a Taliban-affiliated account.

Maryland Smith’s Ritu Agarwal was elected as a fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). The honor is in recognition of her lifetime contributions to the profession and is reserved for only the very top academics and professionals in the field.

Maryland Smith’s Ilya Ryzhov is leveraging a three-year grant awarded by the National Science Foundation to continue research on predictive and prescriptive methods for humanitarian logistics and disaster mitigation.

Income, educational attainment and political ideology all play into racial disparities in vaccination rates that have left African Americans more vulnerable to COVID-19, Maryland Smith researchers found.In a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they write that “structural inequities pose a serious threat to progress” in the push for nationwide vaccination.