Michael H. Cohen ’62 was a 2019 recipient of the Ellis Island Medal of Honor for career achievement in medicine.  

Peter S. Conti ’78, a professor of radiology and director of the Molecular Imaging Center at the University of Southern California, was awarded the 2020 Benedict Cassen Prize by the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging.  

George R. Cotter ’71 MS was inducted into the National Security Agency Cryptologic Hall of Honor in 2020.  

Michael Lavers ’10 MFA is the winner of the Bridport Prize poetry competition. 

Joanna Pearson ’09 MFA is the 2021 winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for her collection of short stories, Now You Know It All.  

Steven F. Rubin ’78 was the recipient of the 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award from the American College of Osteopathic Family Physicians.  

Alan Sorkin ’63, ’64 MA, ’66 PhD, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, received the Johns Hopkins Alumni Association’s 2019 Heritage Award for exceptional and devoted service.  

It was 1848, 15 years before President Abraham Lincoln would issue his Emancipation Proclamation, and former slave Henrietta Wood finally had her freedom papers. 

But what Wood would later term her first “sweet taste of liberty” living as a free woman in Cincinnati only lasted until 1853, when a corrupt Kentucky deputy sheriff crossed the Ohio River, kidnapped Wood, and sold her back into slavery. The abduction set into motion a series of events that culminated in Wood suing the sheriff, by then a wealthy businessman, and being awarded a stunning $2,500 in damages in 1878. It was the largest known sum ever awarded in an American court in restitution for slavery. 

Wood’s experience is the subject of Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America, which earned author Caleb McDaniel ’06 PhD the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for History. 

McDaniel’s work is “a masterfully researched meditation on reparations based on the remarkable story of a 19th-century woman,” according to the judges. 

McDaniel, Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of the Humanities and chair of the history department at Rice University, was doing household repairs at his home in Houston when a friend called to tell him of the honor. “I was stunned. I was not expecting it all,” he says.  

“I’m also humbled and really gratified that the story of Henrietta Wood would get such major recognition,” he says. “The Pulitzer prizes recognize books about significant aspects of American history. This is a really meaningful way for homage to be paid to her.” 

McDaniel learned about Wood from an 1879 newspaper interview a colleague sent him in the fall of 2014. He saw the story of a Black woman’s successful lawsuit against the man who had enslaved her become more relevant after the racial upheaval following incidents such as Freddie Gray’s death in Baltimore and the fatal shooting of nine in a Charleston church.   

McDaniel’s research for the book required research in archives located in nine states, including Ohio, Kentucky, and Texas, as well as Mississippi, where Wood’s son was born, and Illinois, where her son became a prominent Chicago lawyer. 

He was able to harvest significant information from documents and other sources thanks to “the kinds of skills that the Hopkins history department had equipped me with,” he says. 

“Johns Hopkins was a wonderfully supportive place for me to complete my graduate education,” says McDaniel, noting how welcome he and other graduate students were at weekly seminars hosted by the faculty. 

Having earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Texas A&M, McDaniel says his first foray out of Texas with his spouse Brandy ’04 MA (SOE) required some adjustments. “We know about humidity, growing up in Texas. But we had this romantic idea of snow. We learned quickly there is a lot of hard work shoveling and de-icing,” says McDaniel, whose household was without power for 48 hours after a freak winter storm paralyzed Houston and most of Texas last February. 

McDaniel’s first book, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrison Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform, was published in 2013. Based on his dissertation at Hopkins, it focused on William Lloyd Garrison, who founded and published a prominent anti-slavery newspaper in Boston in 1831. The book earned McDaniel the James H. Broussard First Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and the Merle Curti Award from the Organization of American Historians.  

McDaniel established a Twitter account, @Every3Minutes, in 2014 that tweets a reminder every three minutes to underscore the fact that 2,000,000 slaves were sold in the United States between 1820 and 1860. 

He explains that his interest in slavery is a natural result of being an historian of 19th-century United States and the outlawed institution’s impact on the period. 

“[History] is an exciting discipline, not one just about recording dates and names,” he says. 

 

The irony doesn’t escape Stephen Greenspan ’62, an expert on cons and gullibility. In 2009, he lost a good chunk of his retirement savings to one of the world’s best-known con men: the late Bernie Madoff. 

Greenspan was among the 4,800 victims of Madoff, an investment advisor and financier who pled guilty in 2009 to fraud in a $64.8 billion Ponzi scheme. Greenspan learned about his own financial losses two days after getting the first copy of his recently published book, Annals of Gullibility: Why We Are Duped and How to Avoid It. 

Greenspan didn’t plan on pursuing a career researching cons and gullibility. When he was accepted to Johns Hopkins for his undergraduate studies, he had his mind set on a liberal arts degree. He didn’t even know much about Johns Hopkins at the time.  

A casual comment by his high school guidance counselor brought Greenspan to Baltimore from the Bronx, where he grew up. During his junior year, he went to the counselor to discuss where he should apply to college. It would be their first—and only—meeting. The counselor abruptly dismissed Greenspan’s Ivy League aspirations, randomly flipped through Lovejoy’s College Guide, stopped at “J” and told him, Johns Hopkins was “a really good school, and we only send one or two students a year there.”  

Those first tentative steps began a winding career path from history and political science as an undergraduate, postgraduate work in intellectual disabilities, and research work in Boys Town in Nebraska to his present status as an author on avoiding financial scams. He spent much of his career as a professor of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut. In addition to research articles and Annals of Gullibility, Greenspan has written Anatomy of Foolishness: The Overlooked Problem of Risk-Unawareness, and is working on a new book, Gullibility Politics: Understanding Trump and Trumpism. He is also a leading authority in capital punishment cases involving those with intellectual disabilities.  

So how did Greenspan, too, fall for the Madoff financial scam? He points to four factors that combine to form the perfect storm of gullibility and financial loss: situation, such as witnessing friends, family, or people you trust believing in the scheme; cognition, meaning the ability to understand and evaluate the scheme (Greenspan admits to not being a financial expert); personality, or having a disposition such as impulsivity or a tendency to be too trusting; and emotion, such as feeling relieved that one’s financial future is secure. 

“Once you enter the world of a skilled con artist, it’s difficult to keep from becoming further ensnared,” says Greenspan.   

The best way to avoid being gullible in a financial scheme, says Greenspan, is to look for warning signs and take them seriously. And if someone does become a victim of a con, Greenspan says the most important thing is to learn from it, figure out why it happened, and then make sure it doesn’t happen again. 

“Foolish financial decisions do not always take place in response to a manipulator such as Bernard Madoff,” says Greenspan, “but when they do, many quite intelligent people can be victimized, especially when others they respect and trust have also fallen into the manipulator’s trap and have not yet found out what it really is.” 

Nicole Gaudelli PhD ’13 remembers the precise moment she decided to become a scientist. It was fifth grade. Her teacher sent the kids home with the old chestnut of an assignment: What do you want to be when you grow up? Gaudelli’s father, a chemical engineer, asked what her answer might be. “I replied that I wanted to be a doctor because I wanted to help people,” Gaudelli said recently from her home office outside Cambridge, Massachusetts. “He said, ‘Well, doctors diagnose people, but scientists cure people. They’re the ones who make the medicine. Why don’t you want to be a scientist?’”  

The revelation hit her like a lightning bolt. “I never knew I could become a scientist because I never saw women scientists,” she says. The next day, she turned in a picture of a bubbling beaker and a self-portrait, her dark hair sporting a giant pink bow. “I really wanted the teacher to know the scientist was a girl.”  

Last year, Gaudelli’s actual picture appeared in Fortune magazine’s 40 Under 40 list. As the director and head of gene editing technologies at Beam Therapeutics, a biotech firm that recently went public with a market cap of $1.3 billion, she uses the technology that she helped develop to radically change the way genetic diseases are treated.  

Gaudelli never anticipated that she’d end up working in genetics. “I like to joke that I’m a distracted chemist living in a genome editing world,” she says.  

She earned her PhD in chemistry while working in the lab of Craig Townsend, Alsoph H. Corwin Professor of Chemistry, where she focused on natural product chemistry, which looks at substances created through living organisms. She endeavored to answer one of the lab’s longest standing questions: how certain kinds of antibiotics, known as monocyclic beta-lactam, biosynthesize. Understanding that mechanism would allow scientists to reproduce them, but the answer had eluded many before her. For years, Gaudelli worked against the same challenge. “The most important thing I learned at Hopkins is how to persevere in the face of negative results. You learn something with every experiment,” she says.  

One night, Gaudelli was working in the lab running a test when she received a result she couldn’t believe. She repeated the experiment multiple times to make sure. She fondly remembers what happened next: She took her Maltese puppy on a walk through Charles Village near the Homewood campus, and thought: “I’m the only person in the world right now who knows how monobactams are made.” She went in the next day and put her findings on the desk of Townsend. “He looked at it, smiled, ran his hands through his hair, looked at it again. I teared up.” The results were published in 2015 in a prominent paper in Nature.  

It was during her ensuing post-doctoral work in the Harvard lab of David Liu that Gaudelli made another discovery that would result in a second article in Nature, and become one of the pillars around which Beam Therapeutics was founded. Liu’s lab focuses on genetics, and at the time, a scissor-like gene-editing tool known as CRISPR-Cas9 was capable of cutting genomic DNA, but inefficient at reverting single-letter misspellings, one of the most prevalent causes of human pathogenic disease. Many harrowing genetic diseases, like Parkinson’s, result from a point mutation, or a single-letter misspelling, in our 3.2 billion-base pair DNA sequence encoded by the four nucleobases A, C, G, and T. To fix single-letter, disease-causing mutations efficiently, “a pencil and an eraser” approach would be the optimal solution, Gaudelli explained during a 2018 TEDMED presentation, “not scissors and paste.” One of her colleagues in the lab, Alexis Komor, discovered a way to change C to T. Gaudelli tackled the challenge of creating a molecular tool that could change an adenine base (A) to a guanine base (G). This required creating a new enzyme because there wasn’t a protein with this activity found anywhere in nature.   

Today, she is taking those academic discoveries and turning them into promising therapeutic tools. Gaudelli is currently focusing on sickle cell disease, and while she can’t offer a specific timeline of results owing to her company being publicly traded, she can say that she is “extremely excited about what the future will bring.” Given that Gaudelli is an inventor on numerous base editing patents, you can bet her picture will grace many future publications.