• Samuel Cheney ’19 (MFA) received a 2021 Pushcart Prize for his poem “On the Footage of Monet Painting.”
• Stuart W. Davidson ’79, partner at Willig, Williams & Davidson, was named among the 2021 Pennsylvania Super Lawyers for the 18th year in a row. Pennsylvania Super Lawyers is a peerreviewed, independently researched rating service of outstanding lawyers who have been identified as attaining a high degree of professional achievement.
• Eat Wheaties!, a movie based on The Locklear Letters, a novel by Michael Kun ’84, won the Best Comedy award at the 2020 San Diego International Film Festival and the Humor award at the 2020 Heartland Film Festival.
• Emmett F. McGee ’81 was recognized in the 2021 edition of Chambers USA: America’s Leading Lawyers for Business, a prestigious annual guide ranking the leading law firms in the U.S. McGee is a principal in the Baltimore office of Jackson Lewis P.C.
• Mark Monmonier ’64, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Geography and the Environment at Syracuse University, received the Chancellor’s Citation for Excellence Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of extraordinary contributions to the undergraduate experience and research excellence, fostering of innovation, and support for student veterans.
• Michael A. Moskowitz ’64 is part of an international team that received the Brain Prize 2021, a $1.5 million award for groundbreaking work on the causes and treatment of migraine.
• Divorce, Simply Stated: How to Achieve More, Worry Less and Save Money in Your Divorce, by Laurence Sarezky ’71, was ranked Best Family Law Book of All Time by Book Authority.
• Elena Walsh ’09, college access specialist and teacher at Benjamin Franklin High School at Masonville Cove in Baltimore, was one of 12 recipients of the 2021 Counselors That Change Lives Awards from the nonprofit Colleges That Change Lives.

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When Natalie Draisin ’10, MPH/MBA ’15, was an undergraduate at the Krieger School, her sorority sister was killed by a drunk driver who had  several  DUI infractions on his record.  

“[It] was an unimaginable tragedy,”  Draisin  says. “To me, her tragedy was a human rights violation. Everyone should have the right to cross the street without worrying about whether they are going to get to the other side.”  

Draisin’s Alpha Phi sorority sisters and the campus community mobilized to work with the Baltimore Department of Transportation and Mothers  Against  Drunk Driving to redesign Charles Street to help prevent future incidents, she recalls.  

That experience helped put her on a career path that led to her current position as director of  the  North American  Office  and United Nations  Representative  for the London-based FIA (Federation  Internationale  de  l’Automobile)  Foundation. The group’s mission: to reduce  the 1.35 million  deaths  and more than 20 million injuries  annually  on the world’s roads.  

“The public health community avoids using the term ‘accident.’ That implies tragedies could not have been prevented. We use ‘crash’ because we know serious injuries and fatalities are preventable and therefore unacceptable,” she says of her work with the foundation, which was founded in 2001 with a $300 million donation from the FIA, a nonprofit  that includes motoring organizations worldwide and is the governing body of world motor sport.   

Global Road Safety

Draisin  learned of the FIA Foundation  while  interning with the World Health Organization  and joined the group in 2015. Prior to that, while  a  graduate student  at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, she  worked with the  National Transportation Safety Board.  Before returning to graduate school, she worked in  community health in Kenya and  was  a  leadership  fellow with the Pew Charitable  Trusts.  

Though her office is based in Washington, D.C., she was on the road often in her first years with the organization, with destinations as diverse as Ghana, Senegal, Denmark, France, Sweden, Ecuador,  Colombia,  and Brazil.  Since the pandemic,  though,  her travel  time and commute has  dropped to zero.  

“The pandemic has opened up a window of opportunity where the political will and public desire for safe streets align. People are understanding the benefits of moving away from cars,” she says,  citing  residents’  increased appreciation for closing city streets to allow more foot traffic.  

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“Today, one of my major focuses is to get the United States re-engaged in global road safety. It significantly dropped off in the last four years.

— Natalie Draisin

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Incorporating  life-saving strategies  in  the  infrastructure  bill  currently before  Congress  is high on  Draisin’s  priority list.  Among the recommendations issued:  allocate federal funding to improve equity in road transportation; incorporate protected bicycle lanes and roundabouts; reduce speeds to a safe level; and introduce alcohol impairment detection technology in new vehicles.  

She says  the U.S. Centers for Disease Control  and Prevention and  the  National Highway  Traffic Safety Administration play a role in ensuring  more children have safe routes to school in the United States. “What we do in this country has implications around the world,”  Draisin  says.  “I’m excited that we’re at a turning point to address road safety as never before.”  

The elementary school her son, now 2, would attend is only a five-minute walk from her Northern Virginia home, she says. But  as is true in  much of suburban America, there are  no  sidewalks or crosswalks on the route. “This is something that has to change,” she says.   

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Among a sea of physicists, a Black woman tends to stand out, says Jami Valentine Miller, PhD ’06. In the past, when she’s attended large conferences in her field, “it’s not hard, out of thousands of people, to spot the one person who’s like you,” she says. “And then it’s like, ‘Well, let me go over and introduce myself.’” 

Many of the women Miller has met over the years are now officially honored on her website, African American Women in Physics, AAWIP.com. Today the site lists more than 150 Black women in the U.S. who have earned their doctorates in physics, are current graduate students in physics, or have worked in the field. 

The group grows steadily each year, says Miller, who started the site in 2005 as she was working toward her own PhD in physics at the Krieger School. 

“I began collecting a list of all the different Black women I was meeting at these conferences, and posted it on my Hopkins website. And I’d ask around trying to find others,” she recalls. “At the time, most departments didn’t keep track of this kind of demographic information.” 

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We have women working on planetary structures at NASA, women doing geochemistry at Chevron, women doing intellectual property law, quantum physics, cultural astronomy…”

— Jami Valentine Miller

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College and Career

At some point, Miller realized hers was the only name from Johns Hopkins. When she completed her doctorate in physics, she earned the distinction as the first Black woman in the university’s history to do so. 

Miller ended up pursuing a career as a patent examiner at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, where she works on applications for semiconductor and spintronic memory devices, which include devices and features for Samsung and Apple products. 

She teleworks from Orlando, Florida, where she lives with her husband, whom she first met during her undergraduate studies at Florida A&M University and then reunited with years later. She earned her master’s degree in physics at Brown University before moving to Johns Hopkins for her PhD, where she studied under  Professor Chia-Ling Chien. 

Though her work now leans more toward electrical engineering than physics, Miller says: “I’m lucky and it turned out to be the perfect job for me. I know the work I do is important, and I see it play out in products that I use and see in the news.” 

Trailblazers in Physics

Other women on AAWIP have followed similarly varied career trajectories—in many cases diverging from the traditional academic path where the goal is a tenured professorship. “We have women working on planetary structures at NASA, women doing geochemistry at Chevron, women doing intellectual property law, quantum physics, cultural astronomy…” Miller says. “One manages a jazz band.” 

The AAWIP list now includes one other Hopkins alum:  Lynnae C. Quick, ’11 MA, ’13 PhD, who was the second African American woman at Hopkins to earn her doctorate in Earth and planetary sciences and is now a planetary geophysicist at NASA. 

The site also honors past trailblazers, including Willie Hobbs Moore, the first-ever African American woman to earn a PhD in physics; NASA scientist Katherine Johnson (depicted in the movie Hidden Figures); and Carolyn Beatrice Parker, who contributed to plutonium research for the Manhattan Project. 

It’s a small but distinguished list of women—sitting at the intersection of two underrepresented groups in a field dominated by white males. Between 1998 and 2018, consistently less than 25% of physics degrees in the U.S. have gone to women, according to the American Physical Society, while underrepresented racial and ethnic groups have accounted for consistently less than 10% of physics degrees during that time. 

AAWIP exists not only as a platform for celebrating these women, but also for building mentorships and networking opportunities, Miller says. 

“For those who want to hire more diverse candidates,” she says, “we are out here. We exist.”

At the first annual summit of the Biodesign Challenge (BDC) in New York in June 2016, a group of students from the Fashion Institute of Technology presented swatches of fabric made of a yarn-like material that they had synthesized from kelp.  

“And the judges chose them as the winner,” says Daniel Grushkin ’99, founder and executive director of the BDC. “The wonderful thing is that their material is sustainably sourced, and of course it biodegrades, so theoretically, when you’re done with your knitwear, you can add it to the compost to feed your plants,” he says.  

After the competition, the students went on to form AlgiKnit, a company that produces eco-conscious, renewable yarns and employs 16 people in Brooklyn.

Now in its seventh year, the Biodesign Challenge is an international competition for high school and university students. The competition brings together scientists, artists, and designers to imagine and create new applications of biotechnology. Students work in teams on projects throughout the school year while receiving guidance from local mentors identified by BDC. Then, in June, the finalist teams gather at a summit where they present their projects to a panel of judges. The panel includes scientists, artists, designers, entrepreneurs, and others—and compete for prizes, including the grand trophy: the “Glass Microbe.” 

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It became clear to me that if we’re going to see really thoughtful applications of biotechnology in the world, it was going to come through collaborations like these.”

—Daniel Grushkin

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Genspace

Before starting BDC, in 2009 Grushkin co-founded Genspace, a community laboratory also located in Brooklyn. Initially billed as a “hacker space for biology,” Genspace offers members of the general public the opportunity to pursue their own biotechnology projects independently. The members include those from nontraditional and underrepresented backgrounds.

Grushkin has long been interested in exploring connections between the worlds of art and science. As an undergraduate at Hopkins, he majored in English while also taking a number of math and physics classes. After graduating, he worked as a reporter for several years and found himself drawn to writing about science.  

“I started to get interested in the culture of science, and in how science becomes business, and then I got interested in how science really becomes culture and art,” he says. 

Reporter to Founder

In 2008, he began writing about the emerging field of synthetic biology. He heard about a group of scientists in New York who were interested in bringing the tools of the laboratory into their homes for a “do-it-yourself” version of bioengineering.  

That appealed to me—it both raised hackles and seemed concerning [from a biosecurity perspective], and at the same time, it seemed really exciting,” he says. 

As a reporter, he attended the first organizational meeting of these scientists at a diner. At the end of the meeting he found himself offering his apartment as the location for the next meeting. “And so I went very quickly from being a reporter to one of the founders of what ended up becoming Genspace,” he says.  

As Genspace was evolving, Grushkin started to notice that not only scientists were showing up at the community laboratory. Also artists and designers, who would sometimes collaborate with the scientists in meaningful ways.  

“It became clear to me that if we’re going to see really thoughtful applications of biotechnology in the world, it was going to come through collaborations like these,” he says.   

Biodesign Challenge

So, in 2015, Grushkin launched the Biodesign Challenge. The program is geared toward young people that would encourage this kind of cross-disciplinary discussion and interaction. 

The program started at nine U.S. high schools in 2015-16. It has since grown to include 51 high schools and universities in 20 countries. BDC has also found a number of sponsors, including biotech firms like Ginkgo Bioworks and Twist Bioscience. But also Stella McCartney, the fashion brand, and Barilla, the pasta company. 

Looking toward the future, Grushkin believes biodesign will eventually become a standard design discipline at art and design schools. He thinks that ideas coming out of biodesign will increasingly be adopted by companies looking for sustainable solutions. 

“I think that the decisions about how technology gets distributed and rolled into the world—how it emerges into the world—don’t belong only in the hands of entrepreneurs and/or scientists,” he says. “There needs to be a community conversation that involves people from different backgrounds who are knowledgeable and can speak the language of the science. What’s important is that we’re bringing those other voices into the conversation.”