Alex Likowski Email Address

Director of Media Relations, University of Maryland, Baltimore

Maryland Psychiatric Research Center was added to Crunchbase.

The More I Learn, The More I Need To Share I love knowing things–knowing what’s going on and knowing how to do things myself. That’s how I was able to design and build a newsroom, then led the news team to a national CableAce award. It’s why after 13 years as a television journalist, I took a six-year detour to transform a TV station into a digital powerhouse as its director of operations and engineering, and later helped design and build an all-new digital broadcast facility for WJLA-TV. And it’s why I went back for another 12 years of journalism to lead two EMMY Award-winning newsrooms in Washington, D.C. through major events like 9/11 and the DC Sniper crisis. Along the way I found that the only thing I love more than learning about a good story is sharing it with someone else. My 25 years in journalism taught me how to find the story, figure out what it really is and why it’s worth re-telling, and then to tell it in a succinct and visual way. During those years on the technical side of things I also learned how to shoot and edit photos and video, and how to master new technologies as they come along. Today I lead the storytelling team in a place that’s filled with great stories–the University of Maryland, Baltimore. I get to use my skills–writing, photography, and creating videos, to tell the stories of how our clinical work and research is improving the human condition. Like everywhere else, the COVID-19 pandemic imposed some challenges at UMB. But in my case, it also opened a whole new media opportunity: producing and hosting Zoom and Webex programs. Since March 2020 I’ve hosted more than 50 live telecasts with the president of the university, Virtual Face to Face with President Bruce Jarrell. These outward-facing programs allowed me to showcase UMB’s experts in vaccinology and vaccine hesitancy, social justice, mental health, and many other areas of interest to journalists. I’ve also hosted dozens of internal events, providing me even greater connections with our faculty experts. As you might expect, my curiosity about the world doesn’t stop at the office. I’m a trained docent at the Salisbury (Md.) Zoo, I have a commercial crabbing license which I use as a fairly serious hobby, and I’m always looking for ways to protect the environment, from serving on the Queen Anne’s County Sustainable Communities Commission and the UMB Sustainability Committee, volunteering with the Kent Island Beach Cleanup (KIBCU) organization, and serving as an ardent electric vehicle ambassador with my all-electric Nissan Leaf.