We’ve discovered millions of genetic variants that were previously not known across samples of thousands of individuals whose genomes have already been sequenced. We will have to wait until future work to learn more about their associations with disease, but a big focus of work now will be on trying to discover new genetic variations that were previously uncharacterized.”
Seen and Heard: Peter Pomerantsev
One of the most popular Christmas films in Ukraine is Home Alone, which has a narrative that resonates with Ukraine’s story: a small country abandoned by the world’s parents, always attacked by bigger powers and having to improvise self-defence with anything that comes to hand.”
Musical Artifacts Inside Modern Languages Professor’s Office
Derek Schilling is interested in the history of audio, so when he found this 1940s Philco radio console discarded on a Baltimore street, he happily snapped it up. “I don’t really use it much because it only gets about three or four stations, all AM, but you can listen to an Orioles game,” says Schilling, who is professor of French and chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures.
Among Schilling’s collection of LPs is this 1967 12-inch Folkways Records disc featuring prominent francophone poet Léon Damas reading his own works. Beside it sits a statuette that allegorizes women’s literacy in Africa, a parting gift from an undergraduate advisee from Ivory Coast.
“Last semester as I prepared my class on French-language novels of sub-Saharan Africa, looking across from my desk I often thought, ‘maybe I’m reading what she’s reading,’” Schilling says.
Delving into Social Networks and Teen Vaping
While cigarette smoking rates among high school students have plummeted, the use of e-cigarettes, or vaping, has soared. Around one in five high school-aged teens now reportedly vapes. Senior Daniel Habib saw this skyrocketing popularity firsthand. Once, his entire ninth-grade class received detention because of rampant vaping on a field trip.
Vaping has alarmed public health officials because it exposes users to the habit-forming nicotine that is found in regular, combustible cigarettes. Research from Johns Hopkins on vape ingredients published in October 2021 reveals thousands of chemical ingredients in vape products. Most of which are not yet identified.
It was crazy to see how people in high school would come up to me and say ‘I’m addicted, I can’t stop vaping.’ I knew then that vaping was a huge problem.”
—Daniel Habib ’22
Research for a solution
Supported by a Provost’s Undergraduate Research Award, Habib hopes to be part of the solution. His project aims to leverage the prior success of adult smoking and obesity prevention programs that have focused on leaders in social networks. Because peer influence has profound effects on individuals’ engagement in risky behaviors—and especially so in adolescents—he says examining teen vaping through the lens of social networks could enhance school-based efforts aimed at turning the tide.
Habib’s idea developed while taking a sociology class taught by Andrew Cherlin, the Benjamin H. Griswold III Professor Emeritus of Public Policy and now Habib’s faculty advisor. He introduced Habib to the growing literature on social networks and health behavior changes. Habib thought back to a drug use survey he and his high school classmates had felt forced to take. It was an approach that might have produced misleading results because students did not want to disclose incriminating behavior.
“I wondered if I could come up with a better survey,” says Habib, “and build a social influence model of vaping in high school networks, which to date hasn’t really been assessed.”
Surveying students
Habib drafted a simple online questionnaire asking students about their vaping status as well as the names of some friends. He then worked with the Johns Hopkins Medicine Institutional Review Board (IRB) to deploy the survey. It used a security feature designed by the National Security Agency that completely anonymizes students’ names, yet still preserves reported connections between them on a social network level. As an incentive to boost response rates, the survey also randomly awards modest gift certificates. They were made possible through the PURA funding.
One high school has already given the vaping survey to a set of students. Habib is looking to partner with more schools to further demonstrate its usefulness. During the course of his research, Habib published a study in JAMIA Open, a health and medicine informatics journal, about the methodology behind surveying high school students anonymously.
Looking ahead, the biophysics major and bioethics minor plans to go to medical school and continue a career in research. “I never imagined I’d be running my own IRB-approved study as an undergraduate,” says Habib. “It’s been a great experience and has prepared me for what’s next.”
Saving the Bay from Dead Zones
Growing up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Paul Gensbigler loved recreating in nearby Conodoguinet Creek. With each passing year, though, he noticed fewer and fewer fish, as green algae increasingly choked the waterway.
This disconcerting observation stuck with Gensbigler after he arrived at Johns Hopkins. Though originally on the pre-med track, on a whim he enrolled in an environmental class taught by Anand Gnanadesikan, professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. Gensbigler and Gnanadesikan began talking after class, especially about the health of the Chesapeake Bay.
Gensbigler learned more about the degradation he’d witnessed in his hometown creek, which feeds into the mighty Susquehanna River, which in turn serves as the main feeder for the Chesapeake Bay. As the nutrient nitrogen, primarily from agricultural fertilizer runoff, flows downriver, it triggers algal blooms. The algae then die and sink to the bottom, where decomposer bacteria pull oxygen out of the water and form “dead zones,” where fish, crabs, and other valued and commercially important creatures cannot survive.
Understanding how microbes cycle
Fascinated by these connections and hoping to restore waterways both ecologically and economically, Gensbigler became a mentee of Gnanadesikan. With support from a Provost’s Undergraduate Research Award, Gensbigler is now helping answer unresolved questions about the kinds of bacteria removing nitrogen from the Bay.
The Bay is more than just a body of water…[it] is like a living thing, cycling nutrients, and we have a poor understanding of where, when, and which microbes are doing this cycling.”
—Paul Gensbigler ’24
“The Bay is more than just a body of water,” says Gensbigler, a sophomore majoring in molecular and cellular biology. “The Bay in some ways is like a living thing, cycling nutrients, and we have a poor understanding of where, when, and which microbes are doing this cycling.”
“If we find out more about the factors affecting nitrogen cyclers, we can better understand the future of the Bay,” Gensbigler adds.
Gensbigler’s second advisor, Sarah Preheim, an assistant professor in the Whiting School of Engineering’s Department of Environmental Health and Engineering, taught him how to extract microbial DNA from water samples. This spring, Gensbigler has been gathering water samples with fellow undergraduate James “Alastair” Powers on Powers’ boat that they launch from Sandy Point State Park. Back in the lab, Gensbigler and Powers measure the rate of denitrification and identify the denitrifying bacteria in these water samples.
Changing our thinking
In this way, Gensbigler is studying temporal and locational shifts in the distribution of algae-decomposing microbes. Intriguingly, Gensbigler has found evidence that these denitrifying bacteria occupy shallow waters in spring months, and not just deep waters during summer months as expected. “If this anomaly is borne out, it could significantly change our thinking about denitrification in the Bay,” says Gensbigler.
When not out on the Bay or in the lab, Gensbigler is often in a pool playing for the Johns Hopkins water polo team.
“I’m around water as much as I can be,” he says.
New Book: What About the Baby?
A great work of fiction is timeless. It can reflect our own heartache or joy, inspire us, and delight us. According to Alice McDermott, Academy Professor and Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities, humans have a deep, impractical need to read fiction.
We seek truth and consolation in the written word. We are all here so briefly and plagued with so many limitations that we seek fiction in order to live multiple lives.”
—Alice McDermott, Academy professor
Her most recent book, What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction, encapsulates that fervor, and dishes up valuable wisdom about the art of writing. Wisdom she’s gained over a lifetime.
This is McDermott’s ninth book, and her first that isn’t strictly literary fiction. It’s a collection of essays that blends her love of the genre with advice for writing captivating stories. McDermott retired from teaching in 2019 after 20 years at Johns Hopkins and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. What About the Baby? is the culmination of that experience. Many of the essays were originally craft talks from in-person workshops, rewritten for the page early in the COVID-19 pandemic. Together, they give the reader both a practical manual and the intimate sense of peeking directly into the passion and process that goes into her writing.
“I expect the fiction I read to be written with no other incentive than it must be written,” she notes in the first essay.
What to expect of fiction
The opening essay is the oldest in the book, but still feels keenly relevant in 2022. McDermott sets out, alongside Mark Helprin’s short story “White Gardens” and other excerpts, what she expects from any work of fiction. She has high expectations: ruthlessly authentic characters, scenes that replicate our world’s beauty, and a clarity that can make sense of death.
Other essays in her book focus on the skills, effort, and dedication writing requires. Aspiring writers can take away tips on creating an unforgettable first sentence, or the importance of re-reading your own work. Anyone can enjoy her humorous musings on the legacy of writers such as Mary McCarthy or Eugene O’Neill, or what she would tell herself as a young writer. McDermott was torn on whether to include so many excerpts from other books and plays as she rewrote her essays. In the end, she decided that the reading experience would be incomplete without them.
“Anyone who picks up this book loves fiction, is writing it, or loves to read it,” she says. “Why should I say to the reader: ‘This is so beautiful. But I don’t want to trouble you with reading it’?”
Some of the most powerful essays focus on how interacting with others, both personally and professionally, helps craft a writer’s work. She says that communal tinkering with style and craft gives writers (and their coaches or teachers) both a community of commiseration, and the refinement that pulls a wonderful story out of a humdrum manuscript. Outside of the classroom, the fights, frustration, and interpersonal struggle of being human create the base so many good stories grow out of. All drama, she repeats, really is family drama. She’s looking forward to how the drama of the pandemic inspires new fiction from other writers. Her own COVID-inspired short story, “Post,” will appear in The Best American Short Stories 2022.
Take care of your characters
But what about that baby? The titular essay describes a baby from Lillian Hellman’s memoir Pentimento, but McDermott’s point is that the real “baby” is a writer’s characters. This advice is at the heart of the book. To be a good writer, one must put their own feelings aside, even if it requires relentless honesty. A writer needs to put themselves at the service of their characters, and no one else. Either find the essential truth in the world you are creating, or risk being predictable and disjointed, she says. “[This book is] very much about the give and take that happens alone in the writer’s mind,” she says. “How we in this field can support and maybe make each one of us a little bit of a better writer by being the reader that’s also the writer.”
McDermott is using her “retirement” to fulfill what she sees as the major obligation of her career: she has so much fiction she still needs to write. As of spring 2022, she’s finishing two more novels. She is also giving a reading at University of Rochester, and teaching a writing workshop in Connemara, Ireland. Echoing the final essay of What About the Baby?, there’s no other option for her. Writing fiction is just a way of being.
Top Faculty Books Spring 2022
Segregated Time
By P.J. Brendese
Political Science
Explores how racial inequality functions as an imposition on human time.
Capitalist Economics
By Samuel A. Chambers
Political Science
Explains the economic forces that shape the present and structure the future of capitalist societies.
Shelter: A Black Tale of Homeland, Baltimore
By Lawrence Jackson
English and History
A stirring consideration of homeownership, fatherhood, race, faith, and the history of an American city.
The Consumer Revolution, 1650-1800
By Michael Kwass
History
A fresh interpretation of the politics of consumption in the age of abolitionism and the Atlantic Revolutions.
Blue Boy
By Jean McGarry
The Writing Seminars
The story of an art historian with gargantuan ambition and hubris.
Zoom Rooms
By Mary Jo Salter
The Writing Seminars
A poetry collection that considers the strangeness of our recent existence with the enduring constants in our lives.
By Lisa Siraganian
Comparative Thought and Literature
Shows how corporate personhood was used to explore questions of agency and intention.
By Mark Christian Thompson
English
Examines the changing investments of key mid-century Black writers and thinkers, including their growing interest in German philosophy and critical theory.
Creating a Link Between You and the Universe
For the most part, scientists have reached a point of consensus about climate change, so planetary scientist Regupathi Angappan wondered why we still struggle to rally people around the issue.
“I just think that people aren’t able to directly relate to it,” Angappan concluded. “And there is a way in which any aspect can be directly related to someone, if only that view was presented. If only people were taught to take the time to reflect and include that empathetic vision, both for themselves and the people around them, then we would be able to address a lot of this more readily.”
So Angappan, a fifth-year doctoral student in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, applied for a Dean’s Teaching Fellowship to design and teach a course on introductory concepts in Earth, planetary, and space sciences, with the concept of empathy woven into the curriculum to unite the topics with his students’ daily lives and identities.
It’s fundamentally a class that is supposed to make people curious and want to learn and understand that empathy is important, and science can be empathetic.”
—Regupathi Angappan, doctoral student, Earth and Planetary Sciences
‘You from the stars’
The course, The Grandeur of You and the Universe, includes modules with titles like: You From the Stars, You Through the Layers of the Earth, and You and the Anthropocene. In class, Angappan teaches the fundamental science principles, then draws connections between those and daily life and encourages the students to find more of their own. If the Earth’s inner core were not iron, for example, gravity would work very differently, which would change the moon’s orbit, which would alter the historically 28-day lunar calendar that today’s months are based on.
In You, Geology, and Geography, Angappan revealed a link between 70-million-year-old plate tectonics and today’s election map, as described in Lewis Dartnell’s Origins: How the Earth Made Us. When the ocean receded from the Appalachian mountain range all those millennia ago, it left behind a crescent-shaped swath of fertile mud. In the 17th century, that soil was planted with cotton tended by people who were enslaved. Today, that same land stands out in election maps as a blue crescent against a sea of red, reflecting the political leanings of the descendants of the enslaved.
Angappan hopes that showing students such linkages will help them learn that science is not just disembodied facts, but has tangible relevance to their everyday lives. He believes they will then become better communicators of science because they can make those connections for others.
“I always think that my biggest contribution in being in the sciences is to try to find a way to communicate it much more broadly. And this is a direct experiment in doing that,” Angappan says.
Understanding the connection
Junior Lucy Nielsen had always been fascinated by meteorology but until now, she had thought herself out of her depth with hard sciences. But Nielsen frequently notices connections between the class and her public health studies major, centered on the idea of taking care of one another.
“In the grand scheme of things, we can start to feel insignificant,” she explains. “But I feel empowered because it’s all relative: To human beings, human life is everything, and we have a responsibility to make this a better experience for everybody.
“What we’re talking about is how miraculous it is that everything had to be just right for us to end up here. That creates a sense of connection with the people around us, but also a responsibility for the world and environment around us.”
Books to Read in Spring 2022
Our professors talk about the books they’re enjoying this year.
Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World
“I have started reading David Van Reybrouck’s Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World. The author is a historian and writer who might be best known in the U.S. for his award-winning history of Congo, which was translated into English in 2014. This earlier work made me want to read Revolusi as well, and so far the book has not disappointed. Its main topic is the anti-colonial revolution that brought about an independent Indonesia, and the author makes a compelling case for why people who aren’t Indonesia experts should also care about the country’s history and bloody war of independence.”
Joris Mercelis
Assistant Professor
History of Science and Technology
Lifelines: A Doctor’s Journey in the Fight for Public Health
“During the pandemic I have been reading books that portray what it was like to be at the center of important events in public health. In Lifelines: A Doctor’s Journey in the Fight for Public Health, Leana Wen describes how her pro-choice advocacy in medical school evolved into public service as Baltimore City’s health commissioner. Wen takes us deep into Baltimore’s opioid epidemic, and ultimately into her current role as a public voice against COVID-19 disinformation. She conveys the joy of making a difference in the world, and this book would make inspiring reading for students aspiring to careers in health.”
Emily Agree
Research Professor
Sociology
Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore
“I recently returned to Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush because of conversations I’ve had about ‘managed retreat’—the idea that we need to relocate communities now, in recognition of current and anticipated climate hazards. That’s a logical concept in the abstract, but it’s painfully difficult to implement. Rush writes about this dilemma, and much more, through the experiences of people living through environmental change. It is a subjective and beautiful effort to understand how personal values, vulnerability, and loss play out in the context of inexorable global trends. There are no easy answers, but there is human possibility.”
Benjamin Zaitchik
Professor
Earth and Planetary Sciences
Examining the Haitian Revolution
If there is a voodoo ceremony in the woods and no one writes it down, did it happen? Whether it happened or not is beside the point, says Daniel Desormeaux, William D. and Robin Mayer Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. Secrecy is a key part of Haitian history. He has been interested in the political history of secrets, especially secrets surrounding the Haitian Revolution, for decades.
If history is…the revelation or discovery of hidden, or lost, collective written words from the past, that of the slave is the burying of this same collective, unwritten words by any means necessary.”
—Daniel Desormeaux, William D. and Robin Mayer Professor
Varying Haitian Revolution narratives
The Haitian Revolution is fascinating to historians and non-historians alike, because it is the only successful revolt of its kind. Between 1791 and 1804 there was ongoing conflict between the enslaved people (alongside free mulattoes, or “affranchis”) of what was then called St. Domingue, and colonists and the French and British armies. The revolutionaries overthrew French rule and Napoleon’s army to become the first country founded by former slaves.
Beyond these basic facts, narratives of the revolution vary. The first written accounts, by French colonists, downplayed the revolution or maligned the revolutionaries. The earliest Haitian-written history focused on written records from generals and military strategists. It whitewashed the revolution to look more “civilized” in European eyes. Desormeaux is particularly interested in another common narrative, which attributes the success of the rebellion to voodoo. It includes a mysterious voodoo ceremony at a site called Bois Caïman. Some say the event, named after the site, incited the 1791 slave revolt and gave the Haitians powers from African gods. To Desormeaux’s thinking, none of these versions are fully correct. But they show how multiple parties used voodoo, and secrets, to create alternative histories.
When Bois Caïman happened, it was already a secret,” he says. “After it happened, the colonies tried to hide it or displace it. You start to bury what happened under layers of conscious misinterpretation.”
We will never know exactly what happened, but Desormeaux hopes his work shows the revolutionaries were no fools. His graduate seminar, Voodoo and Literature, examines how voodoo has been misrepresented since the revolution. And, why stories about voodoo are so pervasive. Voodoo might not have been magic or evil, but it was a primary form of communication for enslaved people, Desormeaux contends. Voodoo gatherings were the only time they could congregate across plantations. They could pass secrets in plain view of their enslavers.
Sharing lost stories
Desormeaux hopes to see less focus on voodoo in future scholarly work, and more that examines the lost stories of those who fought. He says their stories are complex: they had talent as riders, bushcraft, and communicators. The French Revolution motivated both enslaved people and affranchis. They also knew the mountainous landscape and had skills the colonists underestimated.
Desormeaux’s earlier research has already made an impact. He found, translated, and published the first edition of Haitian Revolution General Toussaint Louverture’s handwritten revolution memoirs in 2011. He is currently working on projects examining ulterior motives of historians of the Haitian revolution, and the impact of cartography on the war.
“If you don’t understand that part, there’s no way you can understand how they [could] defeat the Napoleonic army. There was an underground,” he says. “History seems to focus on the big figures and not on the small figures.”
But the lure of voodoo and secrets is still strong. Within days of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse’s assassination in summer 2021, Desormeaux started seeing new, mystical theories from as far as Brazil refuting what happened. If you can appropriate anything as voodoo, he says, there are always people who will try to tell the story differently.
Studying Brain Response to Social Interaction
It wasn’t until COVID-19 shut down the Krieger Hall lab of Leyla Isik that she discovered the 2010 BBC hit show Sherlock. But instead of binge-watching television to stave off pandemic boredom, Isik, the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor in the Department of Cognitive Science, used it to advance her study of social vision.
Isik’s social vision research focuses on understanding how humans distill social information about others from what we see. “It’s just a ubiquitous thing that we’re always doing… You can’t stop looking at people and thinking about them,” Isik says. “Large portions of your brain are dedicated to recognizing these abilities, but we still don’t really understand how you do this.”
Before the pandemic, Isik’s team hosted study participants for electroencephalography and functional MRI experiments that monitored brain activity. Much of their—and others’—research involved showing participants controlled stimuli. Stimuli such as videos of moving shapes, rather than more natural stimuli like television shows.
So much social cognition research is done with very simple, lab-based tasks. It’s just such a far cry from the real world.”
—Leyla Isik, assistant professor
Natural stimuli versus social interactions
Isik had experience using natural stimuli. Her postdoctoral project involved participants watching a movie. However, the complications of these types of studies drew her away for a while.
“The problem with just showing people movies in the scanner is that [movies] are not designed as experimental stimuli,” she says. “It’s very hard to know if any effect you’re observing is due to the thing you’re interested in or some other highly correlated factor.”
Isik turned to natural stimuli again when her lab closed and her team was unable to perform in-person experiments. She accessed a public data set from the lab of Janice Chen. Chen is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. It showed how the brains of neurotypical adults responded when they watched the first episode of Sherlock.
They needed to overcome the lack of controls in this natural stimulus. Isik and her team expanded on the data set by watching the episode themselves and labeling scenes with a variety of social features. This includes whether characters were interacting, or whether a character was thinking about another character.
Then, controlling for other factors, Isik and her team used machine-learning analysis to identify whether—and how—participants’ brains responded to those different social features. “We weren’t even sure you would see a [brain] response to social interactions in movies,” Isik says. “But there was a good portion of the brain [particularly the superior temporal sulcus] that seemed to be responding only to the social interactions.”
Another study, in which Isik’s team labeled a data set from the United Kingdom that featured adults watching the movie 500 Days of Summer, produced identical findings, she says.
Isolating variables in natural stimuli
The work made two important contributions to the field, Isik says. The research showed it was possible to isolate individual variables in natural stimuli. This is an important methodological tool for future study of social vision in movies and television shows. The study also helped settle the debate about whether, and where, social interactions were processed in the brain. “I’m particularly excited about this line of research,” Isik says. “It brings us closer to understanding social vision in real-world scenarios.”
As the field of social vision continues to move forward—and become more realistic—researchers inch closer to potential real-world applications for their work, Isik says. It could help engineers advance artificial intelligence, such as technology for self-driving cars, to better recognize how people interact. As for medical applications, Isik and her team are beginning a project that will study how autism affects the neural responses to natural stimuli.
Post-COVID Campus Move In
During the hot and humid weekend of August 21, scores of new Blue Jays—many with family members in tow—moved into their residence halls. A week of orientation followed, introducing newcomers to academics, student life, and the Johns Hopkins and Baltimore communities. The evening before fall classes began, students received an official welcome at the annual Convocation ceremony, held on Keyser Quad.
Class of 2025 moves in.
Current students welcomed the incoming class…
…and current students help new students find their way.
A family pauses for a quick snapshot on move-in day.
A family unpacks their car with help from the student move-in team.
Time for a puppy break on this busy day.
Maryland treats for the incoming class.
Scenes from Convocation 2021.
Two students carry in the class of 2025 banner at the beginning of Convocation.
Presentation of the class of 2025 banner.
A view of Convocation 2021 in progress on Keyser Quad.
Smiling students hold up t-shirts imprinted with their class banner.