“It’s just more complex than we thought was going to be the case.”
Seen and Heard: Michael Schatz
“There’s basically an entire human chromosome that had gone missing.”
Blind and Sighted People Understand Color Similarly
People born blind have never seen that bananas are yellow, but Krieger School researchers have found that like any sighted person, those born blind understand two bananas are likely to be the same color and why. Questioning the belief that dates back to philosopher John Locke that people born blind could never truly understand color, the team of cognitive neuroscientists demonstrated that congenitally blind and sighted individuals actually understand it quite similarly.
“A common intuition dating back to Locke is that a blind person could learn the arbitrary fact that marigolds are ‘yellow’ and tomatoes are ‘red’ but would still miss out on in-depth understanding of color,” says senior author Marina Bedny. Bedny is an associate professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.
The findings are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Experiment
In a two-phase experiment, blind and sighted adults were first asked the common color of objects (the arbitrary facts). They were also asked why they were that color, and the likelihood that two of those objects selected at random would be the same color. The objects were a combination of natural things (fruits, plants, gems) and man-made ones (pen, dollar bill, stop sign).
The idea is that to really know something you have to see it for yourself, and without vision, you pick up shallow facts by talking to people. This study with blind people suggests the opposite. Talking to people conveys in-depth understanding of color better than arbitrary color facts.”
— Marina Bedny
Blind participants didn’t always agree with sighted people about arbitrary color facts, say, that bananas were yellow. But, blind people’s reasoning about why bananas are yellow and judgments about how likely two bananas are to be the same color (color consistency) were identical to sighted people, the team found. The result held across different types of objects, including those that are colored for specific reasons, like stop signs, coins, and even wedding dresses.
Blind and sighted individuals also displayed the same depth of understanding in explaining why objects had certain colors, says lead author Judy Kim. Kim is a former Johns Hopkins graduate student who is now a postdoctoral associate at Yale University.
The color of polar bears was one revealing example from the experiment. All sighted participants said they’re white to blend in with the snow but quite a few blind participants said they’re black to absorb heat and stay warm. “Blind individuals give a coherent explanation of a polar bear’s color even when they don’t agree with sighted people on the particular color of a polar bear,” Kim says.
How People Predict Colors
Next the team asked participants to make predictions about the colors of imaginary objects they’d never seen or heard of in an “explorer on an island” scenario. “We wanted to see how people reason about things they have never experienced,” Kim says.
The team told participants about items found on a remote island where the people have their own language, tools, machines, customs, etc., and the island ecology is unique. Participants heard about objects like “a green gem that is spiky, the size of a hand” and “a gadget that is triangular, yellow, and the size of a thumb.” They then asked how likely another one of those would also be the same color.
Blind and sighted people made identical judgments about these novel objects, showing that their color knowledge generalizes to new examples and is not dependent on memorizing.
Bedny would next like to determine how color knowledge is managed in the brain. She would also like to work with blind children to try to learn how and when blind and sighted people acquire understanding of color.
“We hypothesize it’s by casual learning through conversation and reading but when exactly does that happen?” she says. “Do blind and sighted children learn this information in the same way? Are there developmental differences where sighted children acquire the information at an earlier age, before they’re using language and blind children acquire it only after they learned to talk and then catch up?”
Inside the Office of Andrew Gordus, Biology
Like his research, Andrew Gordus’s office is filled with bugs and spiders. “I like embracing the scope of our research and surrounding myself with these things that remind me of the work we’re doing and the people who are doing it,” says the assistant professor in the Department of Biology.
The sea lion skull was a gift from a coworker when Gordus was a postdoctoral fellow at The Rockefeller University. The LEGO sets—including the Harry Potter spider Aragog—were built by Gordus’s son, Oliver, when he was 5. The stuffed worm and the Dr. Worm hat were gifts from former employees in honor of their research on the nematode C. elegans. The spider cutout was hanging on Gordus’s door to welcome him when he joined the department. The print of arachnids was a gift from Gordus’s wife, and the microscope was a gift from his parents and sister.
See the Research
Andrew Gordus and his team’s research discovered precisely how spiders build webs by using night vision and artificial intelligence to track and record every movement of all eight legs as spiders worked in the dark.
Astronomy Meets Pathology to Influence Cancer Immunotherapy
If you shoot for the stars, sometimes you might actually reach them.
Just ask a multidisciplinary team of Johns Hopkins researchers who recently created a new computer program that can strongly predict a patient’s response to a particular immunotherapy drug for melanoma. The program, dubbed AstroPath, is based on a previously developed algorithm that analyzed millions of telescope images to create a precise digital map of the universe.
Sloan Digital Sky Survey
Launched back in 2000, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey was designed by Bloomberg Distinguished Professor and astrophysicist Alexander Szalay. The sky survey “stitched” together millions of telescopic images of billions of celestial objects. Each object expressing distinct signatures. Just as the Sloan Survey maps the cosmos on an astronomical scale, Hopkins Medicine researchers worked with Szalay to map tumor and immune cells on a microscopic scale.
“In astronomy we often ask, ‘What is the probability that galaxies are near each other?’” says Szalay, director of the Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science. “We apply the same approach to cancer. Looking at spatial relations in the tumor microenvironment. It’s the same problem on a vastly different scale.”
The team’s “big data” approach could potentially provide personalized, therapeutic guidance for many cancers, says Drew Pardoll, director of the Bloomberg~Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.
“This platform has the potential to transform how oncologists will deliver cancer immunotherapy,” Pardoll says. “For the last 40 years, pathology analysis of cancer has examined one marker at a time, which provides limited information. Leveraging new technology, including instrumentation to image multiple markers simultaneously, the AstroPath imaging algorithms provide 1,000 times the information content from a single biopsy than is currently available through routine pathology.”
How the Platform Works
To generate images for AstroPath to analyze, tumor biopsy slices are bathed in antibodies tagged with fluorescent markers of different colors. Each indicates the presence and prevalence of a different protein in the biopsy. Together, the six protein markers create a colorful, glowing landscape. The landscape is replete with data on the quantities and spatial relationships of the various components of the tumor and its immediate environment.
“The spatial arrangements of different kinds of cells within tumors are important,” says Janis Taube. Taube is co-director of the Tumor Microenvironment Laboratory at the Bloomberg~Kimmel Institute and co-led the Johns Hopkins team with Szalay.
“Cells are giving each other go/no-go signals based on direct contacts as well as locally secreted factors. Quantifying the proximities between cells expressing specific proteins has the potential to reveal whether these geographic interactions are likely transpiring and what interactions may be responsible for inhibiting immune cells from killing the tumor,” Taube notes.
After biopsies were taken and imaged, patients were given an immunotherapy drug called anti-PD-1 therapy. Then the team tracked their outcomes. Those outcomes were then correlated with their biopsy images and analyzed by AstroPath to search for predictive patterns. The team found that a particular pattern and prevalence of the six proteins on specific cells in the tumor could strongly predict which patients would respond to and survive after anti-PD-1 therapy.
Changing Therapeutic Guidance
The researchers, whose study was published in Science, are already applying their findings to lung cancer. They are hopeful that AstroPath may eventually provide therapeutic guidance for many other cancers.
“Big data is changing science. There are applications everywhere, from astronomy to genomics to oceanography,” says Szalay. “The technical challenge we face is how to get consistent, reproducible results when you collect data at scale. AstroPath is a step toward establishing a universal standard.”
Why We Love Pumpkin Spice
At coffee shops and grocery stores, it was autumn for weeks before the official start of fall, thanks to the early arrival of pumpkin spice. The ubiquitous flavor that has come to signal the season’s unofficial start.
But why?
Smell and Association
Two Krieger School perception researchers say a key to understanding why people love pumpkin spice is the smell of it. Those notes of cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger trigger deeply rooted cozy memories of autumn.
“Pumpkin spice aromas emerge in the fall in shops and cafes, coinciding with the arrival of colorful leaves, family gatherings, and back-to-school bustle. The association that the smell has with the season in our memories allows it to powerfully evoke the refreshing feelings of fall,” says Jason Fischer, assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences.
We often long for the arrival of fall at the end of a hot summer, and our sense of smell can summon up the season early.”
— Jason Fischer
Smells can tap memories more powerfully than any of the other senses, says Sarah Cormiea, a Krieger School doctoral candidate studying human olfactory perception.
She points to evidence that just reading smell-related words, for instance pumpkin spice, will spark activity in the area of the brain that processes olfactory stimuli, the piriform cortex. Even when people merely expect a smell, that neural zone fires up. When you consider how close this brain region is to the area responsible for memory, it’s no wonder the mere mention of a pumpkin spice latte can trigger warm fuzzies.
Combination Smell and Sensory Output
However, for such an evocative sense, people have a very hard time identifying smells they encounter. Particularly without other sensory input to help. For instance, if someone was handed a pumpkin spice drink in a generic cup, they might think it smells familiar. But, they might not quite be able to place it. Once they know what it is, they will perceive the taste and smell even more distinctly, Cormiea says.
“Once someone tells you it’s pumpkin spice, it will seem even more pumpkin spicy,” Cormiea says. “Labels prompt us to reconceptualize an odor—to change how we think about and experience it.”
The sensations evoked by the nose are so powerful that they can upend what many regard to be the Achilles heel of pumpkin spice: its fundamental lack of pumpkin.
“Pumpkin might not be on the ingredient list,” Fischer says. “We can vividly experience it nonetheless. Our minds are very good at filling in missing details, guided by the associations that smells have in memory.”
[Photo: Will Kirk]
From the Dean’s Desk Fall 2021
As I write this from my desk on the Homewood campus, overlooking the Decker Quad, I can’t help but marvel at how things have changed since last semester. It’s a bright, warm early fall afternoon, and I can see a group of curious prospective students and their parents being led on a campus tour. Over there is a student skateboarding down a sidewalk to class. Across the quad is a professor teaching a small class of attentive undergraduates outside. I see two staff members sitting on a bench, laughing in between sips of coffee. This is typical campus life. What’s not so typical, however, is that we haven’t had this since March 2020, and oh, how we’ve missed it.
This Fall on Campus
Is life on the Homewood campus back to “normal” since we’ve been able to gather in person again? No, and to tell you the truth, I don’t know of many aspects of life anywhere that will return completely to the way they were before. But I am proud of the cautionary measures and protocols the university has put into place. Working together, we are keeping each other safe from the pandemic and gathering together in new (and masked!) ways.
It’s that sense of collaboration and partnership that is so distinctly Hopkins. Of course we remained productive during the remote days of COVID-19. Thanks to the creativity and hard work of so many in our community. But exchanging ideas in person again—something I think so many of us took for granted—represents the fertile ground where discovery grows.
Not a single scientist or scholar at the Krieger School works in a vacuum. We are a community of learners and teachers. As such, we depend on one another to question our ideas, lead us down new paths of discovery, raise big questions, and support us in our collective goals of seeking truth and creating new knowledge.
I believe the time we had to spend away from one another only strengthened our resolve to do whatever necessary—in this case, get vaccinated and follow safety protocols—to return to in-person lively conversations and debates.”
— Christopher S. Celenza
Leading the Way
During those dark months of COVID-19, people around the world looked to Johns Hopkins for accurate information and data in their quest to keep themselves and their families safe. Here at the Krieger School, while we may not be on the front lines of the pandemic, we are in the basic science laboratories conducting research that could potentially lead to a cure; we are in humanities classrooms and labs, examining writing and art that has been created in the midst of COVID-19; and we are in communities studying how political leaders managed or mismanaged the ravages of the pandemic.
Whether in the natural sciences, social sciences, or humanities, this is the knowledge we share with our colleagues and students. In turn, they will take that information, refine it, and expand on it. They will teach it to others, even as new generations of scholars come through Hopkins on their way to making a difference in the world. That is the kind of community we have here.
We must continue to take certain precautions and implement restrictions because, as we know, COVID-19 is unpredictable. But we—as a community, as part of the Hopkins family—have brought one another to this point: to the view that I watch unfold on the Decker Quad.
Oh the Humanities: Summer Lab Grows Student Experts
The day the 29 students in this summer’s Humanities Collaboratory officially presented their research to peers, instructors, family, and other onlookers over Zoom, the supportive chats pouring in told the story. “Absolutely crushed it,” said one. “Knock it out of the park.” “That delivery though.” “Love you son!”
It’s the fourth year for the Collaboratory, the brainchild of Natalie Strobach, assistant dean for undergraduate research and director of the Office of Undergraduate Research, Scholarly and Creative Activity (URSCA). Strobach leads the program along with a postdoctoral fellow, the assistant director of URSCA, three graduate student instructors, and a peer mentor. Over 10 weeks, students from historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and community colleges around the country choose a topic, research it, and create a presentation to showcase their findings.
But this is no ordinary undergrad research program. The collaboration expressed in the chats was baked in from the beginning, both inventing a new space for scholars to explore the usually solitary humanities in the kind of synergistic style often found in science labs, and also building the confidence of highly capable students who have not yet recognized themselves as worthy of tackling high-level, groundbreaking research, Strobach says.
Everything is independently designed, and that feeds a lot into the confidence of knowing, ‘wow, I designed this from the ground up; I didn’t just become good at someone else’s thing, but my own interests have value.”
—Natalie Strobach
“And that’s why the projects are so different,” says Strobach. “We have someone working on Spike Lee films and someone doing a translation of an ancient Arabic poem and just wild variety, where you’re like, how did that happen in this one program with this one set of instructors? But it’s because they directed it, and that also builds that feeling of being an expert.”
Creating Bonds Through Research
Each morning, one of the instructors leads a session on a topic related to humanities scholarship—anything from drafting a CV, to using psychoanalysis as a research frame, to doing their own research and writing “out loud” while students observe the process, warts and all. Afternoons, students work on their research in a group. Sometimes that means long periods of silence as students read on their own, sometimes it means someone describing their research and others suggesting readings or where to look for more information. Screen sharing helped everyone see what everyone else was working on. As presentation day approaches, it means practice session after practice session, until delivery is animated, timing is precise, and PowerPoint kinks are worked out.
The process “allowed the students to really bond; they were constantly exposed to what other people were thinking about and working on,” says instructor Alex Streim, a doctoral student in the English department who studies 20th century American poetry and its relationship to pedagogy.
Students entering the program often experience the self-doubt of imposter syndrome, says Samanda Robinson, also an English doctoral student who is researching the ways in which Black science fiction can be a vehicle for social justice and liberation. But she says the Collaboratory’s sense of community erases those fears as instructors share their own research processes, their missteps and rewrites. Students discover the questions they thought too trivial or basic to raise are in fact universal. They see their peers and mentors take their work seriously, and see themselves becoming experts in their subjects. By the end of the session, they have cohered into a circle of colleagues who root for one another, challenge one another, and care about one another’s research, no matter how disparate the topics.
“Now that we’re in our last week, I think it’s finally clicking that ‘wow, we do belong in these spaces, and we are more than prepared,’” Robinson says of the students. She notes that the program’s structure also allows more informal mentoring—such as when students ask her about navigating the ivory tower and finding community as a Black woman—and that the mentoring begun there is open-ended.
They know it doesn’t just stop, but that it’s an ongoing connection that we have and that we’ll always be here for them.”
—Samanda Robinson
Growing from the Collaboratory Experience
For some participants, the experience affirms or inspires once-tentative plans—transferring from a two-year to a four-year institution, for example, or applying to graduate school. The program becomes the kind of network of connections and support that students without a family legacy of higher education often lack, says Noah Thomas, a rising sophomore at Claflin University in South Carolina.
“One of the things that’s transformative about it is it lets you know that there are people within academia, people within these very prestigious spaces, who care about you as a person and as a scholar and as an aspiring academic, and I think just knowing that you have someone who has your back can give you so much confidence,” Thomas says. “If you were ambivalent about going to graduate school, if you were ambivalent about entering these spaces before, after the program, you wouldn’t be, because of the type of support that you received. It’s been transformative in that it’s definitely prepared me for graduate school. I feel like I have a firm grasp of what I would be required to do in graduate school, because this program was essentially us doing for two months what we would do for five to seven years in a PhD program.”
Thomas, an African American Studies and English major, researched how the Africana oratorical tradition evolved into a vehicle for anti-racist activism. Using Black Panther leader Fred Hampton as an example, Thomas traced the evolution of Black oratory as a means toward spiritual harmony and the wellbeing of community from the African okyeame—a trained orator—to what Thomas calls rhetor-activists like Hampton. “His role as an orator and his role as an activist were inextricably linked,” Thomas says.
Coming from an HBCU, which he describes as an uplifting experience that provides a sense of safety, Thomas says he felt much the same security within the Collaboratory. “And I think that says a lot,” he says. “Because there’s never been a time where I have felt marginalized, oppressed, or anything. I always felt as though my voice was valued and affirmed, so it’s been an amazing experience.” Next summer, Thomas will return to the program as a peer instructor.
Ideas Into Opportunities
At the beginning of the program, students use mind-mapping techniques to explore their interests and passions, and home in on a topic narrow enough to cover in 10 weeks. Other projects this summer ranged from a Derridean understanding of friendship in Antigone and Their Eyes Were Watching God and unpacking faux feminism in Bad Bunny’s collaborations, to how Muslim women counteract perceptions of gendered oppression in Islam through autobiography and an analysis of Tupac’s bildungsroman.
Rhiannon Hartman, a rising sophomore at Richland Community College in Decatur, Illinois, knew they wanted to do something related to their passion: folklore. To help refine the topic, Strobach asked them to tell her an all-encompassing story that represents folklore, and they immediately zeroed in on the changeling. (The changeling began as a pagan story about infant boys who were replaced by sickly or deformed fairies; scholars believe the story served as an explanation of disability for parents.) “The changeling is what folklore is all about. It’s a coping mechanism, and that’s what folklore is,” says Hartman, who is majoring in arts with a concentration in history.
Over the next two months, they polished that initial interest into an exploration of how and why the idea of the changeling morphed from an ill boy to a misbehaving woman, as in the 1895 murder of Bridget Cleary by her husband, who claimed that he had to kill her as she had been taken by the fairies. Meanwhile, they themself morphed from a tentative first-year with plans to teach high school history, to a confident researcher with plans to publish their changeling research and become a professor of folklore.
“This whole program has opened up so many opportunities,” Hartman says. “I never thought that I would be sitting here adding to conversations and research. I get to be a part of academia now; that’s so cool.”
I believe in myself so much more now. I have bigger goals, but now I think I can achieve them. I know that I have the ability to do great things because I’ve done great things with this program, and there’s so much more to come.”
—Rhiannon Hartman
That leap in confidence and sense of belonging is exactly what Strobach says she is aiming for. A qualitative study over the past few summers has shown that students typically arrive with rock-bottom levels of confidence, and leave with levels peaking across indicators like “I feel like I have something to offer my peers” and “I belong at a research university.”
“It’s about getting them to understand how much more they can do than they thought; it’s just about changing their expectation,” Strobach says.
How the Collaboratory Works
The Collaboratory is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Leadership Alliance, a partnership between higher education, business, and the public sector that has connected more than 4,000 scholars with research, mentoring, and networking experiences. Undergrad participants and graduate instructors all receive stipends, allowing them to forego often necessary summer jobs. The Krieger School increased its own funding this year, raising the number of students from HBCUs from three in 2019 to 10 (the program was on hiatus due to the pandemic in 2020).
Strobach’s overall goal is multifold. The program has a role to play in diversifying the professoriate and the graduate school pipeline, she says, as well as exposing more students with fewer research opportunities to research and scaling up undergraduate research in general. There’s a general shortage of undergraduate research in the humanities, she points out, because faculty are often less available in the summer due to conferences and their own research commitments, and also because humanities students are typically mentored one on one, creating far fewer opportunities than exist in science labs.
Through applications and interviews, Strobach selects driven participants for whom graduate school seems to be a good eventual fit, she says. She looks for those who will work well in a collaborative setting, can handle an intense research schedule, and who want to be “agents in their own education.”
The model is unusual; instructors are experienced researchers, but they’re unlikely to be familiar with the specific research areas students choose, which creates some vulnerability for instructors, she says. But that absence of hierarchy becomes one of the ingredients that shows participants how little space there really is between them and established, successful scholars.
“Typically, you’re sitting there dumping information into a student; this receptacle model is traditionally what happens,” Strobach says. “Here, we build an expertise with them, which is putting us in a really weird, vulnerable position that they never see their educators in. That helps us as instructors to stay on our toes, but it also helps them to understand that sort of myth of expertise that they’ve always been given, as if we’re born a Shakespearean scholar or something.”
Growth for Students and Instructors
For the graduate students, the experience offers not just an opportunity to practice teaching, but a whole new perspective on how to teach and what teaching consists of. Even during last summer’s hiatus, when the instructors spent their time developing modules and implementation strategies to share the model more broadly, the program seeped into their expectations for themselves as future professors and researchers.
Robinson had always had her eye on a tenure track professorship and continues toward that goal, but she says the work last summer, in particular, gave her an additional skill set to broaden her options and made her think deeply about how to implement into any classroom the kind of lab collaboration the program embodies.
“This has definitely opened me up more into making sure I have conversations with my students and see how they’re feeling, and then thinking about how that reflects in the work that they’re producing and turning in,” Robinson says.
Graduate student Streim says his experience as an instructor in the Collaboratory has expanded his sense of the very purpose of teaching. “In previous teaching experiences, I feel like I’m sometimes bound by a list of outcomes. This was no less rigorous, but it was slightly more open-ended in terms of what those outcomes were,” he says. “Outcomes that are not just technical skills, although that was part of it, but other things like self-esteem and responsibility toward others, as researchers but also just as humans in the world. There was a wider range of what could be taught and learned, and that was exciting to me.”
Editor’s Note
A story in the fall 2020 issue titled “It’s Time for Some Truth Telling” included a photo labeled as 19th-century activist Maria Stewart, but which actually depicted another activist, Charlotte Forten Grimke. There is no known existing photo of Stewart. We have numerous fact-checking methods in place to ensure the articles in the magazine are error-free, but we fell short of our own standards, and we deeply regret the error. We also recognize that this error is part of a larger problem of too easily accepting online material as valid, which clouds the meticulous work of generations of historians, and also falls into the long history of misrepresenting Black Americans.
Kate Pipkin, Editor
[email protected]
Then and Now
Then
Circa 1924, Gilman Hall reigned over a sparsely populated Homewood campus, before Keyser Quad had a name. Remsen Hall, completed in 1924, is visible to the right, but Krieger (1933), Mergenthaler (1941), and Ames (1955) halls had yet to make their appearances. In 1964, the Milton S. Eisenhower Library would join them to complete the rectangle.
Now
When the Milton S. Eisenhower Library was approved in 1961, the architects decided to place most of it underground so it wouldn’t dwarf Homewood House next door (not because Daniel Coit Gilman required that no structure rise higher than Gilman Hall, as a popular legend holds). Generations of students have enjoyed “The Beach” encircled by the original curved drive.
Bill Henry: CV
Baltimore City Comptroller
Education
- 1992 Bachelor’s degree, social and behavioral sciences, Johns Hopkins University (urban studies and public policy)
- 2006 Master’s degree, finance, Loyola University Maryland
Notable
- While a student at Johns Hopkins, he interned for Mayor Kurt Schmoke and worked as a congressional aide to then-Congressman Ben Cardin.
- He worked for several years with the City Council, working his way up from a legislative aide to chief of staff for the city council president.
- Before being elected to the Baltimore City Council, he advocated for communities with the Patterson Park Community Development Corporation and as board president of the Citizens Planning and Housing Administration and the Greater Homewood Corporation (now Strong City Baltimore), where he helped lead revitalization efforts for the York-Greenmount corridor.
- In 2007, he was elected to the Baltimore City Council, advocating for a realignment of city spending away from policing towards education and youth development.
- In 2020, he was sworn in as comptroller of Baltimore City and sits on several boards and commissions.
In His Own Words
This year’s budget operating and capital is going to be over $3 billion but we don’t have the money to do basic things to take care of our kids. How can we not have the money to do that when we have all that money? Let’s look at exactly how we are spending our money. That to me is something that the comptroller should be doing. Not just keeping an eye on the money but sharing with the rest of us that information.
Baltimore Beat, 2019
Baltimoreans need to recognize that youth development isn’t another priority in competition with public safety; it is public safety.
Baltimore Sun, 2009
In government, sunshine is often the best disinfectant. The public must have greater access to the proceedings of the Board of Estimates, where the business of government is transacted. We also must continue to reform ethics policies and financial disclosures.
Baltimore Magazine, 2020
Alumni to Watch
Allysa Dittmar ’14 and Aaron Hsu ’14 were named to the Forbes “30 Under 30” list of emerging leaders in retail and commerce for 2020. Along with other Hopkins alumni, they designed ClearMask, a transparent face mask that increases accessibility for deaf patients.
Alexis Sears ’17 won the 2021 Donald Justice Poetry Prize by Autumn House for her book Out of Order.