Ethnie Jones was 7 when she had her first eye exam. More than 50 years later, she still remembers the reaction of friends and family when she arrived back in her native Trinidad and Tobago wearing her new pink, cat eye glasses. 

“Where did you get those? They are so cool,” she recalls being asked upon her return from her first visit to the United States. 

After 28 years in practice, Jones, BA ’83, MD ’87, feels the same way about being an ophthalmologist.

“I think I am one of the luckiest people on Earth. I haven’t had any disappointments. I am totally happy with my career choice, with where I am in life. If I had it to do all over again, I’d do it the same way,” says Jones, who specializes in cataract surgery at the Virginia Eye Institute, where she is a partner.

As a comprehensive ophthalmologist, she also sees patients with diabetes, glaucoma, and other eye diseases at the institute, one of the largest eye groups in the country with 35 doctors and eight locations in the Richmond area.  

The girl everyone knew as Ethnie Small wanted to be a doctor as she grew up in a small fishing village on the smaller (115 square miles) of the republic’s two islands in the Caribbean Sea. “Very few physicians came to the island of Tobago and certainly no women doctors,” says Jones, the oldest of four children, and the only girl. 

In the early 1970s, her father’s role as a diplomat brought her family to the Maryland suburbs outside of Washington, D.C. She enrolled at Holton-Arms, an all-girls private high school in Bethesda, as a 10th-grader.  

Since she was good at math and science, Jones says the guidance counselor at Holton Arms recommended the all-women Smith College and Johns Hopkins. Warned that Hopkins was only 25 percent female, Jones remembers thinking, “That sounds fine to me!” She visited the campus and fell in love with Hopkins, she says.  

“I came from a small high school, 56 in the graduating class, and I thought a small university would give me a chance to get to know all my classmates, a chance to know my professors,” she says. “It was such a small university that the professors would invite you to their homes for dinner. I loved that. It felt like they really wanted you to succeed.” 

Her major in natural science was common for many in pre-med, she says: “It gave you the good basics for what you would experience in med school.” 

The first patient she saw when she began her private practice in 1992 was a young woman with a large lump on her eyelid. Jones says she was able to put the woman at such ease that she allowed Jones to remove the growth, which had been there for five years.  

“I believe that, in most situations, I can solve the problem, and if not, I can get them help,” she says. 

Her decision to become an ophthalmologist came during her internship at the National Institutes of Health after her first year of medical school. She was working in the lab doing genetic research when her advisor commented that she seemed more suited to working with people than in a laboratory. That led her to the National Eye Institute branch of the NIH, where she met Carl Kupfer, ’52 MD, the NEI’s first director, and his wife, Muriel Kaiser-Kupfer, ’61 MD. Their example, encouragement, and support—which included invitations to dinner at their home on weekends—convinced her that ophthalmology was the right career for her. 

“Mentoring at Hopkins was really important to me, both in education and as inspiration. People like Dr. Levi Watkins and Dr. Claudia Thomas were very inspirational to me,” she says.  

Their example motivated her to mentor students from the University of Richmond and Virginia Commonwealth University as well as work with downtown free clinics during her time in Virginia.  

“With my exposure to Hopkins, I felt obligated to make sure I was able to serve people in the inner city, to find a way to give back to communities that didn’t have access to medical care,” says Jones, who is now a member of the Krieger School Advisory Board. 

“When I was at NEI, I realized people’s vision is the one thing people are the most afraid of losing,” she says. “That’s why I am so happy doing what I’m doing. I’m helping people preserve their vision, so they can drive, so they can work, and see the people they love.” 

Last summer, Molly Dillon ’11 was on a national book tour talking to crowds of young people about her time in the Obama White House. Hers was an inspiring tale. Dillon had been selected, when she was just 23, out of 6,000 applicants to be one of 150 interns at the White House. The following year, Dillon became the youngest staffer ever to be hired as a policy advisor for Urban Affairs, Justice and Opportunity in the Domestic Policy Council, where she worked on civil rights, women’s equality, and housing, among other things, until the end of the Obama administration in 2017.  

Then in March of 2019, the book of essays that she helped compile and write, Yes She Can: 10 Stories of Hope & Change from Young Female Staffers of the Obama White House, became a New York Times bestseller. The message Dillon hoped to impart during her book tour, though, wasn’t a highlights reel of her successes. She wanted to also talk about failure. 

“When people recount their careers, they often only give what I call the Instagram version. There are letdowns and missteps along the way, which I try to emphasize so that young people know they can achieve success after failure.” 

—Molly Dillon

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“I tell them I went through eight rounds of interviews for a different White House job that I didn’t get before I took the one that I did,” she says. In her essay for Yes She Can, Dillon writes candidly about feeling unsure after a minor gaffe during a major event at The White House. “You can’t change the past, only how you carry yourself moving forward,” she told herself at the time, and she persevered. 

It was at Hopkins that Dillon found her path to public service. She had grown up outside of Chicago in a family infused with a sense of progressive liberalism—her grandfather’s optometry practice in Baltimore was named New Deal Optometry—and she became interested in politics after joining her high school congressional debate league. In her senior year, a senator from her home state named Barack Obama announced his candidacy in Springfield, and Dillon knew she wanted to work to support his agenda. “But I wasn’t sure what that meant,” she says. 

Dillon entered her freshman year at Hopkins thinking she would major in political science, but during her first week of school she went to an open house for the sociology department. She lit up at what she heard, realizing that she wasn’t interested in the politics of campaigning, but in the shaping of public policy. With Stephanie DeLuca, James Coleman Professor of Sociology and Social Policy, as her advisor, Dillon says that “a lot of who I am was solidified in those four years,” including becoming a better writer and thinker and developing into “a more caring and aware citizen.” 

Yes She Can—written by 10 women in their 20s as a heartfelt and frank behind-the-scenes look at working in the White House—is meant to demystify politics and serve as a resource for the next generation of ambitious women. It includes “A Girl’s Guide to Getting into Government.”  

“There are lots of ways to serve the public, both in your professional life and your personal life,” says Dillon, who is now a consultant working on advocacy and public policy. “Having a network of supportive women has always been vital to me.” 

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In 2006, new Krieger School graduates Brian Kinsella, Craig Gridelli, and Nick Black traded the relative tranquility of Hopkins’ Homewood campus to serve as wartime officers in the U.S. military. 

Four years later, having gone from Johns Hopkins’ Reserve Officers Training Corps to combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan, they decided to reach out in hopes that GIs who survived the battlefield did not succumb to a lesser-known but no less deadly threat: soldier suicide. 

“It’s pretty prevalent,” Kinsella says of military-related suicide, which claims the lives of about 20 veterans daily, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs’ 2019 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report. The VA has tallied more than 6,000 veteran suicides each year between 2008 and 2017, according to the report, which says the suicide rate for veterans is 1.5 times that of nonveterans. “It’s hard to see people succeed as soldiers in battle only to kill themselves once they come home,” Kinsella says. 

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“We literally started with nothing. Just Brian, Nick, and me trying to figure out what we could do to make a difference.” 

—Brian Kinsella

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Spurred to action by this grim reality, Kinsella asked Gridelli and Black to help him form Stop Soldier Suicide, a nonprofit that provides interventions for soldiers and veterans who are at risk of suicide. 

The three, who had known each other from Blue Jays sports—Black played varsity football, Gridelli was a pitcher, and Kinsella wrestled before breaking his leg his first year—readily agreed.  

That was in 2010. 

Working mostly from their cellphones in their spare time, the three began to put troubled veterans in touch with volunteer social workers who could address their suicidal thoughts. 

“We’ve all had our experience while leading soldiers,” said Kinsella, a former Army captain who recalls having been confronted with suicide attempts—at least one of them fatal—under his command. “This is what military people have to do all the time.” 

Holding together what then was a shoestring organization was touch-and-go at first. Each of the three already had their hands full facing the challenge of transitioning back into civilian lives and starting new careers—Kinsella and Gridelli with New York financial service firms, and Black, who now lives in Charleston, South Carolina, as a business school student.  

 But they found support and encouragement from members of the Hopkins community, who helped put on fundraisers and recruit potential donors from fellow alumni.  

Within two years, Stop Soldier Suicide was able to hire an executive director and begin assembling a staff that has since grown to more than 20 social workers and other personnel. It moved its headquarters from Manhattan to Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina, that year, in part because the area is home to more than 650,000 military veterans plus an additional 91,000 active-duty soldiers and sailors. The state hosts massive troop concentrations at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune and the Army’s Fort Bragg. 

Stop Soldier Suicide staff assess the needs of at-risk individuals via telephone; identify mental health, job placement, recreational therapy, and other resources offered by a nationwide network of more than 4,000 partners to address callers’ concerns; and perform regularly scheduled follow-up contacts and case management to ensure progress. 

The work of non-governmental organizations like Stop Soldier Suicide may be especially significant because troubled veterans are often reluctant to seek psychological help within the VA, often fearing that doing so could hurt their careers. Nearly three in four veterans who commit suicide had little or no contact with the VA’s mental health services, data show. 

Gridelli, who grew up in Oyster Bay, New York, and majored in political science, says military life can produce stresses that are hard to anticipate and often unrelated to the battlefield.  

New recruits, typically in their late teens or early 20s, suddenly find themselves living strictly regimented lives far from home, lacking support from family and friends, often beholden to platoon leaders barely older than themselves, and pushed to physical and emotional extremes. Soldiers leaving the service often return home to stressed marriages and to children resentful of having to re-adapt to a parent they may hardly know. 

“I know of one platoon sergeant who had been serving in Afghanistan, went home on leave, showed up at his house, and his whole family was just gone,” Gridelli says. “Depression and suicidal ideation come from more than just combat.”  

Today the organization handles an average of six and a half requests for help daily from current and former military personnel and their families, according to its website. 

Gridelli says he finds satisfaction in the fact that three athletes from Hopkins are again pulling together toward a common goal.  

“There have definitely been trials along the way,” Gridelli says. 

“We literally started with nothing,” he muses. “Just Brian, Nick, and me trying to figure out what we could do to make a difference.”

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Watch Now: Brian Kinsella talks about Stop Soldier Suicide 

Bruce S. Bochner ’78, Samuel M. Feinberg Professor of Medicine at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, was awarded the 2019 Mentorship Award from the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology, and the 2019 Service Award from the International Eosinophil Society.

Armen Davoudian ’19 MFA won the 2020 Frost Place Chapbook Competition for his manuscript Swan Song.

Peter Devreotes ’77 PhD, professor of cell biology and biological chemistry at the School of Medicine, was awarded the 2019 E.B. Wilson Medal from the American Society for Cell Biology for his research in chemotaxis.