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Neuroscientists Find Brain Mechanism Tied to Age-related Memory Loss

Fall 2018

In work that may deepen our understanding of Alzheimer’s disease and similar disorders in humans, Johns Hopkins neuroscientists working with rats have pinpointed a mechanism in the brain responsible for a common type of age-related memory loss.

brain-shaped puzzle with one piece taken out

“We’re trying to understand normal memory and why a part of the brain called the hippocampus is so critical for normal memory. But also with many memory disorders, something is going wrong with this area,” says senior author James Knierim, a professor in the Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute, whose Hopkins team reported its findings recently in Current Biology.

Neuroscientists know that neurons in the hippocampus, located deep in the brain’s temporal lobe, are responsible for a complementary pair of memory functions called pattern separation and pattern completion. These functions occur in a gradient across a tiny region of the hippocampus called CA3.

Balance in Brain Patterns

In normal brains, pattern separation and pattern completion work hand-in-hand to sort and make sense of perceptions and experiences, from the most basic to the highly complex. If you visit a restaurant with your family and a month later you visit the same restaurant with friends, you should be able to recognize that it was the same restaurant, even though some details have changed—this is pattern completion. But you also need to remember which conversation happened when, so you do not confuse the two experiences—this is pattern separation.

When those functions swing out of balance, memory becomes impaired, causing symptoms like forgetfulness or repeating oneself. The Johns Hopkins team discovered that as the brain ages, this imbalance may be caused by the CA3 gradient disappearing; the pattern separation function fades away, and the pattern completion function takes over.

In the restaurant example, your brain may focus on the common experience of the restaurant to the exclusion of the details of the separate visits, leading you to remember a conversation that took place during one visit, but mistake who was talking. “We all make these mistakes, but they just tend to get worse with aging,” says Knierim.

Pinpointing the memory loss mechanism could lay the groundwork for learning what prevents memory impairment in some humans, and therefore how to prevent or delay cognitive decline in the elderly, the researchers say.

Cooking Things Up

Fall 2018

Josh Abady ’16 recommends that everyone try more weird things. While many of his fellow students became lawyers or doctors after graduation, Abady decided to pursue teaching, chess tutoring, and professional poker. The former East Asian studies major admits it was unorthodox, but he followed his passions (and used the supportive Johns Hopkins network) to land in his current role as entrepreneur and CEO of a successful cooking app.

“Flexibility is sort of all I’ve ever known,” Abady says. “It’s just wired into me.”

His current project is called Manna Cooking, an app and business he created with his sister, Rachel Abady, and his childhood friend, Guy Greenstein. The app lets users add or search for recipes, customize them according to food allergies or dietary needs, and create a grocery list that fills an Amazon Fresh order, all from their phones. It can be a useful tool for all levels of cooks and anyone who wants to make meal planning easier.

close-ups of three dishes from Manna app — Courtesy of Manna cooking

App Life

As Manna’s CEO, Abady never knows what the week will hold. He checks off miniscule tasks every day, but also has weeks where the team blows through goal posts that once seemed impossible. He’s a lifelong gamer who has always enjoyed competition; whether in chess, Super Smash Bros., or professional poker. The pace of entrepreneurial work feeds that desire for challenge. Like in gaming, execution is more important than ideas in the startup world.

“I think a lot of [working in] startups is being really careful about how you spend your time,” he says. “In your first year or two, people pull you in a lot of random directions.”

Abady and his two co-founders launched the first version of the app in 2020, despite funding issues related to the pandemic, and launched the full version in late 2021. He led the business side of the company: dealing with lawyers, accounting, fundraising, and “schmoozing.” The app currently has more than 10,000 downloads and was recently rated #1 on Product Hunt, a prominent site for curating top new products and apps.

A Hopkins Venture

Abady says that in some ways, the success of Manna Cooking was a Johns Hopkins venture. Ian Han ’14 owns the agency that conducted much of the design and user experience work on the app. One of Abady’s best friends from Hopkins, Mario Nelson ’13, has been on the Manna Cooking advisory board from the beginning. When Abady was at JHU, there were fewer opportunities to get started as an entrepreneur. He says he’s proud to see how much progress JHU has made in the area, now that HopHacks and FastForwardU are frequently part of an undergraduate’s experience, and of how many JHU alumni collaborate on startups.

“Hopkins really helped me so much with Manna specifically, and always in ways that I didn’t expect,” he says. “No matter who I spoke to when it came to [the app], they were always willing to take the call. It’s been a really powerful network.”

Looking to the Past for the Future

Fall 2018

Daphne Tang’s fascination with history and other countries and cultures goes back to the stories her parents told her as a child. Immigrants from China, Tang’s parents settled at first in the New York City borough of Queens, and then when she turned 5, the family moved to suburban Somerset County in New Jersey.

Tang’s parents shared with her what life was like for them growing up, about China’s tremendous economic development, and how the nation differs from the United States.

“I loved hearing my parents’ stories about their lives in China,” says Tang, a senior majoring in international studies and economics. “Those stories sparked my interest in learning about the rest of the world.”

Local Social History

Tang found herself drawn to Johns Hopkins for its diverse academic strengths in policy and international relations. She quickly joined the Foreign Affairs Symposium, a club dedicated to discussing global issues, and went on to serve as its co-executive director. Reflecting her concurrent interests, Tang also joined the professional development club Women in Business at JHU and rose to the role of co-president.

Dovetailing with her studies, Tang cultivated a deep fascination with the social, political, and economic history of Hopkins’ home—the city of Baltimore. “I really value learning about the stories of the local community that I am a part of,” says Tang.

While enrolled in a history seminar titled The Year 1968: Rebels, Revolutions & the Right-Wing Backlash, taught by Victoria Harms, a visiting assistant professor in the Department of History, Tang pursued a Baltimore-centric research paper. The paper compared the local legacies of the Holy Week Uprising in 1968, a wave of civil unrest in major U.S. cities following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and the demonstrations against police brutality in 2015, following the death of Freddie Gray.

Encouraged by Harms, Tang submitted the essay to an annual contest held by the Baltimore City Historical Society. In recognition of the essay’s insightful and nuanced analysis, the organization awarded Tang the 2021 Joseph L. Arnold Prize for Outstanding Writing on Baltimore’s History.

Taking Work to the World

Following her undergraduate successes, Tang plans to attend law school to specialize in either international or business law. She can imagine herself working in government, given her prior internships at the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Trade and Development Agency, or in the private sector, based on her recent experience interning in compliance at investment bank Goldman Sachs.

“I’ve learned so much in my years at Johns Hopkins,” says Tang. “I look forward to taking what I’ve learned out into the world and positively impacting people’s lives.”

Learning About Minds and Machines

Fall 2018

Wires in the form of a human head in an abstract space.

Is the human mind a computer? Could a computer ever think like a human? In the course of the 1940s to 1960s, an influential group of computer engineers, psychologists, and philosophers argued for a resounding “yes” to these questions. Known as “computationalists,” these thinkers founded the fields known as artificial intelligence (AI) and computational psychology, traditions of research that continue to the present day.

For a while, funders invested heavily in the computationalist paradigm. This included AI researchers’ efforts to create models of human thinking in the form of computer programs. By the late 1970s, however, technical disappointments and powerful theoretical objections led to lost traction for both computationalism and AI, a period known as the “AI winter.” Since then, AI eventually found its way back to the public spotlight.

Philosophical Questions of AI

Phillip Honenberger, a faculty affiliate of the SNF Agora Institute, is fascinated by the philosophical questions: Is the mind a computer? To what extent can computers think? But he is also captivated by the historical ones. He wonders what the history of computationalism and AI research can teach us about their prospects today. Honenberger shared his curiosity with students in a class he taught over the summer, Minds and Machines. Students explored these topics through discussions, primary and secondary source readings, and interactive websites on neural networks and machine learning.

“There have been at least two approaches to AI since the 1940s,” notes Honenberger. “Symbol processing approaches conceived of intelligence as symbol manipulation according to rules and heuristics, while artificial neural network (ANN) approaches modeled it on the structure of interconnected neurons in animal brains. AI’s pre-winter public profile was primarily symbol processing, but its post-winter resurgence has relied much more heavily on ANN.”

One major goal of the course, Honenberger says, was for students to learn to distinguish between the technology, how it works, and what it is actually currently capable of, on the one hand. And the various abilities people have sometimes fantastically ascribed to it, on the other.

“Futuristic prognostications are sometimes just science fiction-y, and involve philosophical leaps of inference—like, if we built a machine that acted indistinguishably from a human, it would have to be conscious; or, if we could somehow ‘upload’ our personality to a machine, we could live forever. Sometimes people just assume the technology will deliver something like ‘consciousness’ or ‘personality’ that there’s no clear understanding of the mechanisms of,” he says. Honenberger wants his students to notice and critically dissect those leaps in logic.

Everything is Connected

The course closed with small groups of students producing reports on topics related to the mind/computer analogy. Honenberger designed the project Honenberger to create “cross pollination” as students tackled the interdisciplinarity of their topics.

Incoming first-year student Alex Witzke was in a group that studied memory. He wrote a paper exploring how close AI could get to human memory from a philosophical perspective.

“The class showed me how interconnected things are that I used to think were a lot more separate, like technology and philosophy,” Witzke says. “It showed that there’s definitely a connection between almost every single field you can think of, if you want there to be a connection, which is really interesting to me.”

Making Brand New Materials

Fall 2018

What if you could, atom by atom, build any material you wanted? That’s the principle behind the groundbreaking work of Rebekka Klausen, the Second Decade Society Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry.

Chemists refer to themselves as one of three types, Klausen says: makers, modelers, and measurers. “I’m a maker,” she says, explaining her work as one of very few investigators who apply the concepts of rational organic synthesis to other elements in the periodic table such as silicon, thereby pushing the frontiers of materials science. Rational organic synthesis involves posing a hypothesis about how carbon-carbon bonds can be formed, and how to control the three-dimensional shape of a molecule, to make a target structure.

More Sustainable Substitutes

Klausen’s lab develops innovative synthetic chemistry for energy-relevant materials. Specifically, the researchers are exploring the properties of carbon and silicon molecules, polymers, and other materials with the aim of making more sustainable substitutes for existing materials. One of their interests involves interactions with light.

Consider large, rigid solar panels, for example. Today’s versions are thick partly because they’re inefficient at absorbing light, Klausen says. If they could be produced with different materials with different structures that absorb different wavelengths of light, they could be thinner, portable, more efficient, and less wasteful, she says.

In work funded by the Department of Energy and published this year in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Klausen’s lab demonstrated how to use structure and shape to control how silicon absorbs light. Her team found that linking together hexagon-shaped silicon molecules in a zig-zag fashion was more effective than linking them in a straight chain.

“It really is making something that’s never been made before,” she says of her work. “It’s a unique privilege being a scientist and a synthetic chemist, and I love that I get really excited by new structures and thinking about what we can accomplish with those structures.”

Organic Molecules as Catalysts

Klausen completed her PhD in organocatalysis—a field that uses organic molecules as catalysts for chemical reactions, and which was the subject of research which won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. “I learned so much about synthesis and the special ability chemists have to make things really precisely,” she says. “I became very interested in how do I take that skill set and bring it in a new direction?” When Klausen joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in 2013, she began exploring the creation of synthetic materials using silicon—the Earth’s second-most abundant element after oxygen.

3-d model of hexagon-shaped silicon molecules — Klausen’s lab showed that linking together hexagon-shaped silicon molecules in a zig-zag fashion was more effective than linking them in a straight chain.
[Image: Klausen Lab]

One important focus of her work is sustainability. New projects underway are investigating methods to extend the life of single-use plastics, to potentially keep them out of landfills. Another in water remediation is exploring how to remove and destroy fluorinated polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS), such as Teflon, that accumulate in water and don’t degrade, some of which have been associated with cancer clusters.

Beyond training a new generation of creative thinkers, Klausen hopes to make her mark in science in a hands-on manner: “I want to be able to show that through chemistry, through synthesis, you can find new materials that create new technological opportunities,” she says. “That combination is what’s really important to me.”

New Faculty Books Fall 2022

Fall 2018

The Migration-Development Regime: How Class Shapes Indian Emigration

By Rina Agarwala
Sociology

Explores how India has used its poor and elite emigrants to further Indian development.

The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion

By Sean Carroll
Physics and Philosophy

Introduces a way of seeing that will resonate across cultural and generational boundaries.

Collateral Damages: Landlords and the Urban Housing Crisis

By Meredith Greif
Sociology

Investigates how local laws and practices perpetuate disadvantage among marginalized populations and communities.

City on the Edge: Hong Kong Under Chinese Rule

By Ho-fung Hung
Sociology

Offers insight into the fraught economic, political, and social forces that led to the 2019 uprising in Hong Kong.

On the Path to the Place of Rest: Demotic Graffiti Relating to the Ibis and Falcon Cult from the Spanish Mission at Dra Abu El-naga

Co-authored by Richard Jasnow
Near Eastern Studies

A holistic study of the twilight of Pharaonic history that represents a true collaboration between archaeologists and philologists.

The Last Revolutionaries: The Conspiracy Trial of Gracchus Babeuf and the Equals

By Laura Mason
History

A retelling of the trial of Gracchus Babeuf, who fought to revive the French Revolution.

Polygamy: A Very Short Introduction

By Sarah M.S. Pearsall
History

Explores what plural marriages reveal about the inner workings of marriage and describes the controversies surrounding it.

Elements of ∞-Category Theory

Co-authored by Emily Riehl
Mathematics

Develops the theory of ∞-categories from first principles in a model-independent fashion.

The Critique of Nonviolence: Martin Luther King, Jr., and Philosophy

By Mark Christian Thompson
English

Reveals the depth of King’s political-theological critique of police violence as the illegitimate appropriation of the racialized state of exception.

A Path to Pediatrics

Fall 2018

Tobacco thrives in the soil around the town of Blairs, Virginia, just north of Danville, the last capital of the Confederacy after Richmond fell. Bright futures often do not. In addition to socioeconomic factors, “my town had a very antiquated notion of race, let’s put it that way,” says LaTonya Russell ’00, noting that Confederate flags were a common sight in the area. “It’s not always a place people are able to get out of.”

But Russell did.

Now a pediatrician at the Sentara Family Medicine and Pediatric Clinic in Chesapeake, Virginia, since 2016, Russell serves as a role model for her young patients every day. She proudly points out that several of her former patients have become veterinarians, pre-medical and pre-law students, and nurses. She’s hopeful that out of the nearly 20 patients up to age 23 she sees in a full day at the center, more will choose medicine as a career option.

That so many get to see a Black pediatrician is a huge change from when she was their age living in Blairs, a census-designated community near the North Carolina border. “We rarely went to the doctor. My parents and grandparents would doctor us up,” she recalls about the homestyle remedies for what ailed her and her older sister. “I didn’t see a physician of color until I was in high school.”

Early Inspiration

When she was 12 or 13, Russell read about renowned Johns Hopkins pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson, now retired from medicine. It changed her career plan from teacher to doctor. “I always liked science. I always wanted to know the why, always taking things apart to see how they worked,” she explains.

Russell was determined to get out of Blairs. She applied to several universities, including Johns Hopkins, and was accepted by all of them.

She chose Hopkins, lured by Carson’s historic neurosurgical procedures at the Hopkins Children’s Center. “It looked like a really good place to become a doctor,” she says. “But really, I did not think I would get in, having grown up in a really small town in an area known more for tobacco and textiles.”

Her confidence did not increase upon her arrival in Baltimore. “The whole process was daunting. I was scared. I didn’t have any family in the area. I didn’t have any friends initially. I did not come from money and here are these people with vacation homes, people who paid to go to their high school,” she says. “More than the place itself, it was the people. And how did I fit in due to my academic preparation and life experiences.”

Community Health

She learned quickly. “It was a microcosm of the real world. It was very hard. If you did not ask for help, you were not going to get it. There was no pussyfooting around,” she says. “You had to learn to deal with all sorts of people. But the friends I made, the awesome faculty members I got to know and love, the support we received, those were the most important things.”

Her medical school plans melted under the pressure of biology, physics, and chemistry classes. “I wanted to be more involved in community health, and I found the public health and natural sciences major,” she says about her degree path.

After graduating from Johns Hopkins, she went to Atlanta, where she completed a master’s degree in public health at Emory University. While there, she worked in adolescent health, providing everyday life skills and sex education for children, and AIDS prevention. Urged by some physician mentors to combine prevention and intervention approaches, she applied for medical school at the University of Virginia.

Supporting the Uninsured and State Insured

“It was a great opportunity,” says Russell, who is now also the pediatric director for the community care clinics Sentara offers throughout Virginia for the uninsured and state insured. Working with children also proved to be the right choice. “Medicine is hard. Whether you’re discouraged by something you couldn’t fix or do for your patient, or because medicine is big business, there are a lot of disappointments,” she says. “But I love the kids. The kids are the best part of my day. I love my job.”

She wants others—especially those who are part of a traditionally marginalized community, to follow. She and her father, Sidney, founded the Mary Russell and Lillie Brown Memorial Bicentennial Scholars Fund for medical school students at University of Virginia. Named in honor of her two grandmothers, it will help those from economically and socially disadvantaged communities.

Achieving Biological Balance

Fall 2018

Among the most startling insights of modern biology is how much of “you” is, well, not “you,” at least at the cellular level. All told, the microbiome—the community of single-celled microorganisms living in and on our bodies, and especially in the digestive tract—outnumbers human cells about 10 to 1. Researchers have only recently begun to understand the deep linkages between our health and these abundant microbiomic guests.

Biological connections have long fascinated Kent Kotaka. He is a molecular and cellular biology major who graduated in May 2022, and is set to complete his combined master’s degree in 2023. Kotaka recalls that when he incurred skinned knees and other typical childhood injuries, his grandparents, who practiced traditional Chinese medicine, often treated him with antibacterial herbs. “This made me realize organisms interact in many interesting ways in nature that we know very little about and can take advantage of,” says Kotaka.

Exploring the Human Microbiome

Intrigued, Kotaka later conducted research in high school through a college preparatory program on antimicrobial compounds produced by plants. The experience helped lead him to Johns Hopkins, with its emphasis on undergraduate research. And eventually, to exploring the human microbiome. Kotaka connected with a microbiome lab headed by William Ludington, a principal investigator in the Department of Embryology at the Carnegie Institution for Science. The department is located on Johns Hopkins’ Homewood campus and affiliated with the university. There, Kotaka has worked closely with another mentor, postdoctoral fellow Robert Scheffler, in studying bacteria that harmoniously coexist in the microbiome.

The researchers are looking into assisting these microbial communities to recover when disruptions occur, for instance from people taking antibiotics. A frequent side effect of the drugs is diarrhea because of collateral damage inflicted on beneficial microbiome residents. The importance of Kotaka’s work extends to chronically disrupted microbiomes, which are strongly associated with conditions including type 2 diabetes, obesity, and inflammatory bowel disease.

Lab Work

In the lab, Kotaka and colleagues are examining how two groups of bacteria, Acetobacter and Lactobacillus, get along in the guts of a special breed of Drosophila fruit flies. These flies can tolerate long periods without food, meaning their resident microbes must likewise deal with nutrient resource limitations. By adding ratios of the critical nutrients carbon (for energy metabolism) and nitrogen (for protein synthesis), the researchers can gauge when the bacterial groups reach a state of symbiotic cooperation. “If we know factors that contribute to the microbiome’s stability,” says Kotaka, “we are better informed about how to treat its instability and imbalance.”

Kotaka hopes ongoing microbiome investigations will inspire scientists to take more holistic approaches to biology. “For a long time, biology was about studying each cell, each protein, each gene in isolation,” says Kotaka. “But I think exciting patterns emerge when you focus on interactions that occur on organism, population, or even ecosystem levels.”

Class of 2026

Fall 2018

In late August, Johns Hopkins welcomed its newest Blue Jays to the nest—more than 1,300 members of the Class of 2026 and their transfer student peers. During orientation, they gathered for the traditional class photo.

Araceli Frias, Assistant Dean for DEI

Fall 2018

Araceli Frias was named assistant dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the Krieger School last January. She was previously assistant dean for diversity in the Graduate School at the University of Utah. Frias earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Eastern Washington University in psychology, and a PhD in education with a specialization in cultural studies and social thought in education from Washington State University.

What is your role, broadly speaking?

I help shape the campus-wide effort to recruit, retain, and support a diverse faculty, postdoctoral staff, and undergraduate/graduate student body. My work has involved asking a lot of questions and reviewing school-level data to understand where we stand across those domains and to identify need for new/improved initiatives, practices, or policies. This year we are re-launching the department diversity action plans and I am providing guidance to our department diversity champions in this effort. I am also a partner in advancing Johns Hopkins’ Roadmap on Diversity and Inclusion.

What are your top priorities for DEI at the Krieger School?

Building relationships with Krieger faculty and campus partners; streamlining the efficiency of our faculty hiring process; and making sure department diversity champions and others have the resources and training they need. The diversity champions are my go-to partners, and I’ve been learning about their particular goals, challenges, and needs, and the ways faculty hiring happens differently in different fields.

How does your office work with students?

I develop programming and community-building opportunities with Krieger fellowship awardees, including the Kelly Miller, Nathaniel Boggs, and Beverly Wendland fellowships. I ensure graduate students are aware of new initiatives that are rolling out, such as the Alumni Leadership Mentoring Program for underrepresented PhD students and the Graduate Ambassadors Program. I also connect with undergraduates when I recruit at graduate school fairs or host on-campus visits.

What is important for people to know about the field of DEI?

The work is massive and it is a shared responsibility. Everyone has an opportunity to think through ways to incorporate a DEI lens into their work. It requires humility, reflection, an interrogation of our beliefs, and acknowledging that we all have blind spots. Additionally, we must have a commitment to our self-education and growth. Some may think DEI practices or recommendations are just opinions and ideas, but they’re not. It’s a specialized field informed by research and there are best practices and standards that are adhered to.

In your first few months, what stands out to you about the Krieger School?

Dean Chris Celenza’s leadership, and his championing of DEI. To be effective, DEI officers need to be in spaces where the higher leadership embodies DEI values.

Why JHU Students Love Being a Classics Major

Fall 2018

“My favorite part about studying classics is how I’m always surprised by just how similar we can be to the people of antiquity. Reading classical texts featuring children rebelling against overbearing parents, poems by grown men hurling sexual insults at their rivals, and tales of displaced peoples seeking a place to call home serves as a reminder of the humanity we all share across time and space, even when society seems to change so much around us.”

Humza Qureshi ’23

“I love studying classics in part because it teaches you to think both critically and creatively, whether you’re finding the right word to translate a text or creating a science fiction narrative like that of ancient historiographers. More than that, though, studying classics allows me to learn about and be in conversation with the ancient cultures and people who have helped shape our modern societies.”

Noa Vineberg ’23

“Being a classics major has enabled me to not only examine landmark pieces of ancient Western literature closely but also to study their lasting impacts on society. This mixing of ancient and modern has given me a unique perspective on classical antiquity brought into a broader historical and even global sphere that has helped deepen my understanding of these great works in context.”

Ankita Sen ’24

“I love classics because I am interested in languages, history, and reading texts in the languages that they were written in. I also really enjoy taking small classes with professors who are passionate about classics.”

Amy Kronenberg ’24

Unlocking Words with the American Prison Writing Archive

Fall 2018

Prisons across the country offer opportunities like 12-step programs and GED or college classes, and incarcerated people often try to take advantage of them. But more frequently than most people realize, those efforts are stymied by guards wielding spontaneous rules that prevent the incarcerated from attending, or mysterious rosters that don’t include their names.

“I was no longer the biggest obstacle to changing my behavior. The barriers erected by prison officials—inane rules, long waiting lists, hassles, and humiliations from abusive guards—became my greatest challenge,” Dean Faiello wrote in an essay while incarcerated in the Attica Correctional Facility in New York.

An Important Collection

Faiello’s essay is one of 3,300 that make up the American Prison Writing Archive, an open-source digital collection of firsthand testimony by people incarcerated around the U.S. The archive is in the process of moving from Hamilton College, where it was founded, to Johns Hopkins, where it will grow and serve as a resource for anyone interested in learning more about life in the carceral system.

Adriana Orduña ’23 is one of several Hopkins scholars already delving into the archive. She recently spent two semesters reading and reviewing the essays to understand how guards and other officials use hierarchy, rules, and regulation to control incarcerated people, and the harm this “bureaucratic violence” causes. Orduña found that the practice of this unsanctioned punishment, which comes on top of the official sentence, is prevalent, serving as a devastating—and little known—element of incarceration.

“Guards want to exact their own version of justice. They think that people in prison deserve to be punished. So they create these additional punishments all the time,” says Orduña, who is majoring in international studies and sociology.

Police and Prisons

Always interested in social justice, Orduña took a 2020 course with Stuart Schrader, an associate research professor in the Department of Sociology and the Center for Africana Studies, on police and prisons. When Schrader emailed students a year later with an offer to join a research project involving the archive, Orduña jumped at the chance to go beyond the theory she had learned in class.

Once she landed on the topic of bureaucratic violence, Orduña—who hails from New York— narrowed her focus to upstate New York, reading and analyzing 170 essays. She found them both upsetting and compelling. She often rose early to read another set before class, and eventually produced an academic paper on her findings. In October, Orduña and two other undergraduate researchers presented their papers at a panel about the archive.

“It’s really different to read essays written by scholars versus reading letters from people who are experiencing prison every day,” she says. “The incarcerated authors have a lot to say about what’s going on inside, and they often have really in-depth analyses.”

The American Prison Writing Archive is currently housed at Hamilton College in New York. The archive is scheduled to be moved to Johns Hopkins by December 31, 2022. It will be housed at the Sheridan Libraries.