Samuel Cheney ’19 MFA won a Pushcart Prize for his poem “On the Footage of Monet Painting.”
Kiara C. Eldred ’20 PhD received a Damon Runyon-Sohn Pediatric Cancer Fellowship Award for her research on retinoblastoma.
Nicole Gaudelli ’13 PhD, head of gene-editing technologies at Beam Technologies, was named to Fortune’s annual 40 under 40 list.
David Jones ’17 PhD received NASA’s Einstein Fellowship. Jones researches supernova cosmology in the era of cosmological tensions at UC Santa Cruz.
(a sampling)
Note: Erdrich has also written poetry, short stories, and children’s books.
People are always deciding that they know how to portray Native Americans. The movies. The sports team. The military. They just love to use native imagery, right? And they think they know how to use it because they get enamored of the ferocity. Whereas I am of a people who is so benign.”
Time
I think in this time of isolation people also appreciate the intimacy of books, the chance to engage deeply with a stranger, to marvel (or possibly scoff at) at the workings of another human mind.”
Commonweal Magazine
Erdrich remembers the support of other students and of mentors like John Barth who “set the tone for the seminars—intellectually acute, lighthearted, generous, bold,” and John Irwin, in whose class she “kept copious notes because half the words he used I had to look up, and the other half were outrageously interesting.”
With its groundbreaking special effects and sweeping storytelling, the Star Wars franchise has surely led many a youthful viewer to pursue a career in filmmaking. Indeed, one of these space epics is partly why identical-twin brothers Curtis and Thomas Nishimoto are film and media studies majors. Well, sort of, the juniors say. “When we were 4 or 5, we had Star Wars: The Phantom Menace on DVD and we just would watch the making-of special, over and over again,” Thomas says. “Yeah, I think we saw the behind-the-scenes stuff before we saw the actual movie,” Curtis adds.
The nuts-and-bolts glimpses of the world on the other side of the camera proved even more magical than the movie itself, and soon the two were creating their own cinematic offerings. (Not that George Lucas had to look over his shoulder—the twins initially specialized in stop-motion animations using Legos and a camcorder.) Still, the movie bug stuck. Coming to Johns Hopkins, the self-described “best friends forever” were both convinced, as the cliché goes, that what they really wanted to do was direct. But then they joined Studio North, a student-run production company. “Curtis went into production and I decided to check out screenwriting,” Thomas says. “And I discovered that, hey, I really liked writing.”
Now the twosome is combining these talents for the film Nurikabe, which Thomas wrote and Curtis will direct. The 12-minute movie, to be shot next summer, is described as a dark fantasy in the vein of 2006’s Pan’s Labyrinth and incorporates elements of Japanese folklore. Indeed, the title is the name of a Japanese spirit creature that takes the form of a wall impeding travelers. In Thomas’s script, three friends are on a hike during the summer before their first year of college.
“The theme concerns facing the future and incoming obstacles,” Thomas says. “Going off to college represents a big change and is a source of anxiety. And so the Nurikabe is kind of a creature that embodies all those fears and anxieties—it manifests itself as all the obstacles and boundaries and things that you have to get past.”
Presently the brothers are putting together the cast and crew for this fantastical coming-of-age tale. The ideal location has already been scouted: a historic lockhouse on the C&O Canal in central Maryland. It’s the perfect setting for the Nurikabe to appear—if not the best place to shoot a film.
“It’s going to be a challenge,” Curtis notes. “There’s no power, no air conditioning, and it’s a quarter-mile walk from the nearest parking lot.”
Still, there’s no going back to Legos.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than 2 million people are incarcerated in the United States—in county and city jails, and state and federal prisons. No other country has so many of its citizens behind bars. As an overwhelming majority of these inmates will eventually be released, providing ex-offenders with a smooth reentry into society is among our era’s greatest challenges, says junior Taharat Sheikh, who is double majoring in sociology and neurology.
Sheikh has long had a keen interest in this problematic topic. She worked as a student researcher on a University of Maryland, Baltimore County project examining prison labor while still in high school, and now tutors incarcerated individuals as a volunteer with the Johns Hopkins Jail Tutorial Project.
She says it was “a no-brainer” to make incarceration the subject of her Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. Her project focuses on the role of the faith community in welcoming recently incarcerated Muslim women back into society and how mosques combat the stigmatization of these individuals—or fail to.
“As a Muslim woman myself, mosques are a big part of my life,” Sheikh says. “Having a personal stake in the topic makes me that much more passionate about it.”
It’s also an underresearched area, as she has yet to find any solid demographic data showing how many Muslim women are incarcerated. She is concerned that as women members of a minority religion, they could face “overlapping vulnerabilities” during incarceration and afterward—all compounded by many being low-income people of color. “I’m using my Wilson Fellowship to interview these women and just get an idea of what challenges they face when they come out,” she says.
A British study of women Muslim ex-offenders in the United Kingdom found that the Muslim community is generally more accepting of male prisoners, with females returning from incarceration sometimes marginalized and viewed as bringing shame and dishonor to their families.
Sheikh hasn’t discovered such a pattern here yet, though her project is still in the early going. Working with Islamic prisoner aid organizations in the U.S., she has only interviewed two of an eventual 20 incarcerated Muslim women. But she is in this for the long haul, hoping it will form a senior thesis and lead to publication and conference presentations. “Because of my passion for the topic, I’m open to pursuing it as part of a PhD,” Sheikh adds.
It is common knowledge that the human brain is divided into left and right hemispheres. Perhaps less known is that this division first occurs when an embryo is five to six weeks old, about the same time that cells associated with vision divide to form the basis for our two eyeballs. When this separation doesn’t occur properly, the resulting abnormality is known as holoprosencephaly, or HPE.
HPE’s mildest variation can cause one of the most common birth defects: the mouth malformation known as a cleft palate, usually easily repairable with surgery. At its most severe, HPE can result in a fetus with a distorted, single-lobed brain and cyclopia—just one eye (rare defects that usually lead to miscarriages or stillbirths).
What causes this pivotal division to fully or partially fail? There could be environmental reasons, but senior Niat Habtemariam, a molecular and cellular biology major, is looking for other causes while working in the lab of Professor Roger Reeves in the Department of Physiology at the School of Medicine.
“The goal of the lab, in general, is to discern the genetic aspects of it,” she says. “There is a region on the 21st chromosome that is known to be associated with HPE, but it’s just a region and not a gene. We want to figure out which genes are the ones responsible.”
One gene of interest has the curious name of sonic hedgehog. (Yes, after the 1990s video game.) It makes a signaling protein that is responsible for, you guessed it, Sonic hedgehog signaling, which embryonic cells use for proper cellular differentiation. Working with cell lines, Habtemariam can “knock out” (render inoperable) certain genes and then determine whether sonic hedgehog signaling is disrupted. Understanding the genetic roots of the condition could help doctors detect and even treat the condition.
Habtemariam has worked in the lab for nearly a year, though she has had to conduct her research remotely for the past several months because of COVID-19. Lately, she has been reviewing the literature to see how sonic hedgehog signaling can be regulated to treat clinical features (such as a smaller cerebellum) of Down syndrome, a genetic disorder characterized by having three copies of the 21st chromosome.
“I’ve definitely expanded my breadth of scientific knowledge,” Habtemariam says. “I plan to go to medical school, and studying how these genetic conditions can come about has been very relevant for me. This project is unique, as not many people study this condition. Highlighting and understanding these complex and little-known abnormalities should help me better understand a lot of other things in the medical field.”
Since 2016, a sophisticated telescope designed and built on the Homewood campus has sat high on a remote desert mountaintop in Chile. It is steadily probing the sky, seeking to pinpoint the cosmic dawn. Well, that’s one of the missions the Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) has as it looks for microwave traces of the events that formed the universe nearly 14 billion years ago: essentially, the beginning of everything.
Sophomore physics major Lucie Afko, whose television growing up was usually tuned to the Science Channel so she could learn about black holes, wormholes, and such, was “very excited” to get involved with the time-crunching project through a Bloomberg Distinguished Professors summer program. “I worked with a team of cosmologists (including Bloomberg Distinguished Professor Charles Bennett and Associate Professor Tobias Marriage) trying to figure out what happened in the first few seconds of the universe,” she says.
She didn’t visit the remote, windswept telescope—actually four separate telescopes made up of multiple detectors tuned to probe specific frequencies—but instead worked remotely to improve one of the detectors. “It’s an upgrade of sorts,” Afko says, “trying to make one of the telescopes more sensitive.”
There are physical chips inside each detector that take in all kinds of electromagnetic radiation—a lot more than is actually needed. The chip, then, needs to dispel the excess energy, and do so without causing interference.
“So, what I was doing was trying to design a chip that will dispel that excess radiation in a controlled way so it’s not just going everywhere and messing up the rest of the detectors,” Afko says. “The bulk of my research was making simulations using fancy software called HFSS [High-Frequency Structure Simulator].”
After about 10 weeks of painstaking trial-and-error modeling, she had the simulations performing as desired and ready for their last set of tests.
“I learned that I asked a lot of questions, which I’m finding out is actually not a bad thing,” Afko says of the project. “I learned some of the ins and outs of working with other people. And I also learned that cosmology is pretty cool. I think it’s giving my love for particle physics a run for its money.”
Ava Hoffman collects seeds from the prickly lettuce plants —a wild relative of the lettuce in our salads—that she grows in the Greenhouse on the Homewood campus. These plants sprung from seeds that her colleagues collected from prickly lettuce growing in a variety of environments in cities across the United States.
Hoffman, a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Meghan Avolio, assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, is growing these plants under a single set of conditions to determine what variation is linked to their origins versus what is coded in their DNA. Her goal: to understand how these tough plants have adapted to the stresses of city life.
112: years the Greenhouse has been in existence
487: panes of glass
70: length of the Greenhouse in feet
100: plants
80: hours Hoffman has spent in the Greenhouse so far
1.5 trillion: DNA bases sequenced by the end of Hoffman’s project
“What makes public health appealing to me is that in order to achieve goals like reducing disease and injury, eliminating health disparities, and maximizing the well-being of the population, being interdisciplinary is not just favorable, but a must. Having the ability to integrate all fields of study, public health creates space for people with differing interests and expertise to come together and contribute to initiatives that benefit us all.”
—Abena Otu-Adum ’23
“The goal of public health is to help better our lives: increasing quality of life, promoting health, and preventing illness. Studying public health changes your perspective completely and inspires you to create active change in your life and society, to help everyone lead healthy, happy lives.”
—Rubi Ramirez ’21
“If I had a dollar for each time someone asked me what my major even means, I’d probably have enough to fund a research study. People tend to think that public health is just pandemics or health inspections, but it’s much more than that: exploring areas like social media, racism, climate change, immigration, and practically everything else.”
—Charlie Nguyen ’21
“The public health major has taught me about the roles that STEM, social science, and humanities all have in addressing issues on the community level. It has shown me how health disparities occur as a result of design and policy choices, and that we all have a responsibility to change how these decisions are made.”
—Caroline Cerilli ’22
Renee Eastwood has been the Krieger School’s director of academic and student affairs for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows since the position was created in 2014. She began her Johns Hopkins career in 2003 in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, served as director of admissions at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, and oversaw the graduate programs in the Health Sciences schools at West Virginia University before returning to Hopkins.
I provide academic and student life support. It’s my job to know all of the university, divisional, and student services policies and resources available. I help graduate students and postdocs navigate academic and personal life challenges. I also serve as an advisor to several graduate student groups and work with campus partners to create opportunities for meaningful engagement.
Often graduate students are slightly older and in different phases of their lives. Many have family obligations and are balancing that with the rigor of a PhD or master’s program. Graduate studies can also be isolating, as students can get immersed in their research. It can be a high-pressure environment and maintaining a healthy work/life balance, staying connected to peers, and knowing when to ask for help are all incredibly important.
They are opportunities for graduate students to propose a course and teach it on their own. It’s a wonderful opportunity because the students propose remarkable courses that might not otherwise have been considered. The interdisciplinary approach is something we see a lot with the fellowships, and we support that wholly.
It’s similar to my role with graduate students in that I help postdocs understand how everything works, how all the pieces fit together, and if they’re having any troublesome times or confusion, then I’m certainly there to step in to help them.
That I’m here and happy to talk with graduate students and postdocs. Sometimes it can be really difficult to sort things out on their own and that’s OK; we’re here to talk them through these moments.
Erin Chen ’20, the winningest fencer in Hopkins history, has advanced as a conference-level nominee for NCAA Woman of the Year. While 21 sports are represented among 161 nominees, she is the only fencer. Chen, who counts 364 career wins, holds the women’s fencing record for wins in a season (113).
The Intercollegiate Tennis Association named 15 Blue Jays Scholar-Athletes, and the team earned All-Academic Team accolades for the 10th straight season. The 15 selections are a school record and the second most in the nation. Hopkins has produced 111 ITA Scholar-Athletes since 2007, and has had at least 10 selections in each of the last six seasons.
The 2019 national champion team earned its seventh consecutive American Volleyball Coaches Association Team Academic Award, which requires a GPA of at least 3.3. This is the seventh straight year the Blue Jays have won this award, and the eighth in the past nine years.
Peter Milliman, who spent the past two-plus seasons as men’s lacrosse coach at Cornell and had guided the Big Red to a No. 2 national ranking in 2020 before the season was canceled, was hired as Hopkins’ new men’s lacrosse coach.
Marking a school record, nine members of the women’s lacrosse team have been named Big Ten Distinguished Scholars, requiring a minimum GPA of at least 3.7: Becca Boyle, Georgia Esmond, Kathleen Garvey, Jeanne Kachris, Robyn Lipschultz, Trinity McPherson, Kaitlyn Pham, Michelle Poirier, and Lexi Souder.
Six team members were honored by the United States Track and Field and Cross Country Coaches Association for excellence in academics, earning a GPA of 3.3 or higher: Vipul Bhat, Daniel Chen, Alex Dixon, Declan Hines, Andrew King, and Kevin Sommer. The team earned a combined cumulative GPA of 3.56 to earn All-Academic team recognition.
Total first-year enrollment: 1,300
Total applicants: 29,612
In the top 10 percent of their class: 99%
First-generation college students: 16%
Countries represented: 29
“I am all for people finding enjoyment and beauty wherever and whenever they can. But I do think there’s an opportunity to sync with these images and the photographers and with other women pictured in the archive. We can do all of these things at once. We can hold the pandemic and the protests and the beauty of Viola Davis and her magnificent back—her stunning image—and hold that constant with what is meant to have been inspired by, and what is in the archive that also adds to that and complicates it.”