Humanities Legend Richard Macksey Dies at 87

Fall 2018

Richard Macksey in his library in 2006.

Richard A. Macksey ’53, MA ’54, PhD ’57, a legend not only in his own fields of critical theory, comparative literature, and film studies but across all of the humanities, died July 22 in the Baltimore area after an illness. He was 87.

“Legend” doesn’t really sufficiently describe Macksey, who managed to fuse enormous intellectual achievement with a deeply human nature. He was a man who read and wrote in six languages; was instrumental in launching a new era in structural thought in America; maintained a celebrated library of more than 70,000 books and manuscripts in his home; inspired generations of students to follow him to the thorniest heights of the human intellect; and penned or edited dozens of volumes of scholarly works, fiction, poetry, and translation.

Macksey loved classical literature, foreign films, comic novels, and medical narratives—all subjects he taught at one time or another. Conversations with him were renowned for the way they leaped from one topic to another—all connected by his seemingly boundless knowledge, prodigious memory, and sense of humor—and surprised his interlocutors into new levels of understanding. For many at Hopkins and far beyond, he was no less than the embodiment of the humanities both in intellect and spirit.

“From the very start, our department has been committed to questions at the intersection of literature, philosophy, and aesthetics, and Dick epitomized this tradition in everything he did,” says Lisa Siraganian, associate professor and J. R. Herbert Boone Chair in Humanities, who chairs the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature. “For over three decades he developed and nurtured the department’s thriving humanities honors curriculum; served as the longtime editor-in-chief of the comparative literature edition of our home journal, Modern Language Notes; shared his vision of the humanities at the School of Medicine; and mentored hundreds of undergraduates, graduates, and faculty members. He was incomparable—and will be deeply missed.”

After beginning his undergraduate studies at Princeton, Macksey transferred to Hopkins and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1953 and master’s degree in 1954, both in the Writing Seminars. He went on to earn a doctorate in comparative literature from Hopkins in 1957 and returned to Hopkins as assistant professor in the Writing Seminars a year later.

In 1966, Macksey led the charge in founding the Johns Hopkins Humanities Center as a meeting ground and incubator for problems, ideas, and discussions across disciplines. Macksey served as its director from 1970 until 1982 and was a professor on its faculty until his retirement in 2010. In January 2018, the center was renamed the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature. Macksey continued to teach several courses until as recently as spring 2018.

Also in 1966, Macksey and colleagues convened an international symposium at Hopkins called “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man.” It was the first time that many leading figures of European structuralist criticism presented their ideas to the American academic community, throwing open a new conduit to avant-garde French theory and placing Hopkins at the center of intellectual conversation.

Famous for his generosity of spirit with everyone he met, Macksey held joint appointments in the Writing Seminars and in History of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where he co-directed the humanities programs starting in 1990.

In 1972, Macksey and his wife, Catherine Macksey, converted the garage of their Guilford home, just blocks from the Homewood campus, into a library. The collection is as far-ranging as his interests, covering every genre in just about every language. Macksey and his students and friends competed with those books for space around a table late into the night, often fueled by cookies and the smoke from his ever-present pipe, and surrounded by works of fine art.

Macksey received numerous awards over the years. Among them: the university’s George E. Owen Teaching Award (1992), given annually for outstanding teaching and devotion to undergraduates; and the Johns Hopkins Alumni Association’s Distinguished Alumni Award (1999) in recognition of his remarkable career. Also in 1999, the Richard A. Macksey Professorship for Distinguished Teaching in the Humanities was established. The Alexander Grass Humanities Institute hosts the Richard A. Macksey Lecture annually.

To learn more about the man, his books, and his legacy, visit: bit.ly/macksey

Bringing the University to the Community

Fall 2018

  • photo of woman singing
  • photo of trumpet player
  • photo of two boys looking at a book
  • photo of people greeting each other at event

Faculty and students from Johns Hopkins enjoy a day with members of the Lafayette Square community.
[Photography by Michael McCoy]

Professor Lawrence Jackson wants to bring Johns Hopkins to the masses, in particular to the Baltimore masses. That’s why the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of History and English started the Billie Holiday Project for Liberation Arts.

When Jackson accepted the position at Hopkins after 14 years teaching at Emory University in Atlanta, it was a homecoming of sorts. Jackson grew up in Baltimore and still has family members—including his mother—who live there. Baltimore also has strong ties to two people who spark his research interests: Frederick Douglass and Billie Holiday.

The goals of the Billie Holiday Project are to document the history of African American life, literature, and art in Baltimore and to foster intellectual ties between Johns Hopkins and the historic areas of Baltimore.

Jackson recently received a university Discovery Award to conduct his work and build a team with partners from Peabody, the Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the Sheridan Libraries and Museums.

“We aim to create venues in the community and outside of campus to demonstrate our willingness to engage in a stronger relationship of sharing our mutual expertise,” says Jackson.

The project comprises four initiatives: build an archival collection of African American primary sources that document art, politics, and history in Baltimore’s black communities; sponsor research fellowships for advanced study of black Maryland; create a college pipeline partnership where students from Baltimore City Public Schools can meet and be inspired by Hopkins undergraduates—especially those of color; and establish ways to bring arts and humanities programming to various parts of the city.

All four efforts are underway, with the most recent being the inaugural Billie Holiday Jazz Concert, held in September in Lafayette Square Park in West Baltimore. Faculty, staff, and students from Hopkins mingled with community members and listened to musicians, including members of Peabody’s jazz faculty.

“We hope to activate a permanent relationship between Hopkins and communities south and west of the Homewood campus,” says Kali-Ahset Amen, associate director of the Billie Holiday Project and assistant research professor in the Department of Sociology.

Jackson, who has made digital map presentations about Holiday’s early Baltimore life, emphasized the role of the Lafayette Avenue neighborhood to Holiday.

“Billie Holiday, who was born Eleanora Gagan, lived at 1421 Fremont Street and at 1325 Argyle Avenue near the square,” says Jackson. “She was sexually assaulted at a young age on nearby Riggs Avenue. The Baltimore jazz music at Biddle Street’s Galilean Fisherman’s Hall and Pennsylvania Avenue’s Royal Theater became the bedrock of her early tastes.”

He adds that Frederick Douglass attended the nearby Sharp Street Memorial United Methodist Church.

Jackson and Amen have also started the Donald Bentley Memorial Lecture, and noted playwright and actor Anna Deavere Smith will be the inaugural speaker. Bentley was the up-and-coming young leader in Baltimore who was shot and killed during a robbery in 1989.

Close to 500 people gathered for the inaugural jazz concert. “We’re looking to craft a new kind of public collaboration,” says Jackson. “One that acknowledges the existence of the racial barriers of the past and emphasizes the possibilities of access at our fingertips today. The scholarship and research at Johns Hopkins today has the same corresponding high value to every Baltimore community as the city’s people and rich heritage have to contribute to Johns Hopkins. We all flourish in mutuality.”

In Memoriam

Fall 2018

photo of Richard Zdanis

Richard A. Zdanis ’57, PhD ’60 (Physics), who served in the Johns Hopkins administration and as professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy for many years, died May 5, 2019, of a stroke in Columbus, Ohio, where he lived. He was 83.

A Baltimore native, Zdanis spent two years at Princeton after earning his doctorate at Johns Hopkins. He returned to the Hopkins physics and astronomy department as assistant professor in 1962. Celebrated for his research on high-energy physics, he earned the rank of professor in 1969 and co-chaired the department’s high-energy group. He conducted early particle physics research at the National Laboratory at Brookhaven, Long Island, New York, and then moved to the newly completed Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in Palo Alto, California.

Zdanis also served as associate provost from 1975 to 1979; as vice president for administrative services from 1977 to 1979; and as vice provost from 1979 to 1988. As vice provost, he led several significant initiatives including the sale of the Garrett Coin Collection in four separate auctions from 1979 to 1981. The coins were collectively auctioned for more than $25 million, raising critical funds at a time the university was facing a fiscal crisis. Zdanis also played a key role in formulating Hopkins’ successful response to NASA’s Request for Proposals for the Space Telescope Science Institute. NASA awarded the institute to Hopkins in September 1981.

In 1988, Zdanis moved to Case Western Reserve University as provost, where he remained until retiring in 2000 as provost and university vice president emeritus and professor emeritus of physics.

photo of Bert Green

Bert F. Green, professor emeritus in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, died in July at the age of 91.

Green was a noted teacher, researcher, and consultant specializing in psychometric methods for computer-based adaptive testing, as well as performance assessment and health assessment. He arrived at Johns Hopkins in 1969 having earned a bachelor’s degree at Yale in 1949 and a master’s and PhD at Princeton in 1950 and 1951, respectively. Before coming to Hopkins, he served on the staff of the Lincoln Laboratory, MIT; as a consultant in computer science for the Rand Corporation; as professor of psychology and department head at Carnegie Mellon; and as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences. He retired from Hopkins in 1998 and went on to serve as a statistical consultant.

Green authored more than 110 scholarly articles. He served as editor of Psychometrika from 1972 to 1980 and as president of the Psychometric Society in 1965 and of Division 5 of the American Psychological Association in 1978. He was honored by that division for distinguished lifetime contributions in evaluation, measurement, and statistics in 1997.

photo of Steven Zucker

Steven Zucker, a professor in the Department of Mathematics, died September 13, 2019, after a long illness. He had turned 70 the day before.

An internationally recognized mathematician, Zucker is best known for his work in algebraic geometry, and especially in the theory of L2 cohomology. In 1980, he formulated what became known as the Zucker conjecture, an influential conjecture that attracted widespread attention and was ultimately proved by Eduard Looijenga in 1988, and again by Leslie Saper and Mark Stern in 1990.

Born in New York, Zucker earned a bachelor of science degree from Brown University in 1970 and a PhD from Princeton in 1974. He served as assistant professor at Rutgers University and associate professor at Indiana University before arriving at Johns Hopkins as associate professor in 1984, and he was named professor the following year. He had been on medical leave from Hopkins since January 2017.

Zucker was a visiting professor at the Max Planck Institut für Mathematik in 1987, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Fellow for Research in Japan at Kyoto University in 1993, visiting professor at Université Paris 7 in 1997, and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1998–1999.

In 2012, Zucker was named an inaugural Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. He served as director of the Japan-U.S. Mathematics Institute from 2005 to 2007; as a regular short-term visitor at the Hanoi Institute of Math and at National University of Singapore; and as an official short-term visitor at Kyoto University in the mathematics department or at the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences in 2002, 2006, and 2015.

Faculty Awards

Fall 2018

Emanuele Berti, Professor, Physics and Astronomy, was named a Fellow and President Elect of the International Society of General Relativity and Gravitation.

Veena Das, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor, Anthropology, was named a Fellow to the British Academy. Das also received an honorary doctorate from the University of Bern, Switzerland, in addition to one from Durham University, England.

Laura Di Bianco, Assistant Professor, German and Romance Languages and Literatures, was awarded the Lauro De Bosis Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Italian Civilization at Harvard University, for spring 2020, for her research project “Crumbling Beauty: Italian Cinema in the Age of the Anthropocene.”

Karen Fleming, Professor, Biophysics, was awarded the $50,000 Provost’s Prize for Faculty Excellence in Diversity for her work supporting gender equity in science fields.

Andrei Gritsan and Oleg Tchernyshyov, both professors in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and Michael Falk, Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy with a joint appointment in the Whiting School, were elected Fellows of the American Physical Society.

Taekjip Ha, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, Biophysics, was named a 2020 Fellow of the Biophysical Society. The honor recognizes members who have demonstrated excellence in science and contributed to the expansion of the field of biophysics.

Marc Kamionkowski, William R. Keenan, Jr. Professor, Physics and Astronomy and Robert Moffitt, Krieger Eisenhower Professor, Economics, were named to the National Academy of Sciences.

Michael Levien, Assistant Professor, Sociology, won three additional awards for his book Dispossession without Development: Land Grabs in Neoliberal India: the Sociology of Development Section Book Award; the Political Economy of World System Distinguished Book Award; honorable mention, Asia/Transnational Book Award; and the Global and Transnational Sociology Best Scholarly Book Award.

Brice Ménard, Associate Professor, Physics and Astronomy, gave the prestigious Hans Jensen Lecture at the University of Heidelberg in October. The lecture is named for Hans Jensen, who shared the 1963 Nobel Prize for the nuclear shell model, and is intended to honor speakers who have made fundamental contributions to a research area in modern physics.

Deborah McGee Mifflin, Associate Teaching Professor, Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures, was elected president of the Maryland/DC Metro chapter of the American Association of Teachers of German.

Samuel Spinner, Assistant Professor and Zelda and Myer Tandetnik Chair in Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture; German and Romance Languages and Literatures, was awarded a fellowship at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, where he will work on a book, Museums of Words: Holocaust Museums and Literature.

V. Sara Thoi, Assistant Professor, Chemistry, received the Maryland Innovation Initiative Award from TEDCO and the State of Maryland, to support development efforts on MOF-based energy storage devices.

David Yarkony, Associate Professor, Chemistry, received the 2019 Herschbach Medal in Theory Award, which recognizes “bold and architectural work, inspiring and empowering.”

New Bloomberg Distinguished Professors

Fall 2018

Matthew Kahn, a leading investigator of the causes and consequences of urban economic growth, joined Johns Hopkins as the 42nd Bloomberg Distinguished Professor. He holds joint appointments in the Krieger School’s Department of Economics and the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School. Kahn also serves as the new director of 21st Century Cities, the university’s hub for urban research, education, and outreach.

Kahn’s research focuses on the significance of quality of life in cities as a driver of economic growth. In recent years, he has worked on measuring the carbon footprint of various cities and explored how urbanites and their cities are adapting to the threats of climate change—the topic of his upcoming book from Yale University Press.

Kahn has held professorships at Columbia, Tufts, UCLA, and, most recently, the University of Southern California, where he chaired the Department of Economics. As a visiting professor, he has taught at Harvard, Stanford, and the National University of Singapore. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research fellow at IZA Institute of Labor Economics. He serves as an associate editor of the Journal of Urban Economics and for PLOS One.

Ian Phillips, an expert in the intersection of philosophy and brain science, was named Johns Hopkins’ 44th Bloomberg Distinguished Professor. He holds joint appointments in the Krieger School’s William H. Miller III Department of Philosophy and in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.

Phillips explores the points at which the philosophy of mind and cognitive science intersect, using the strengths of each to inform his work in the other. Studying the relationship between the two, he examines questions of the nature of perception, the scientific study of consciousness, and temporal experience.

Most recently, Phillips was the chair in Philosophy of Psychology at the University of Birmingham in the U.K., and spent the last two years as a visiting research fellow in cognitive science at Princeton University. Previously, he was a professor of philosophy at Oxford University, and before that a lecturer at University College London. Phillips is editor of The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Temporal Experience and has served as editor of the interdisciplinary academic journal Mind & Language and consulting editor of Timing & Time Perception.

Hanna Pickard, a leading applied philosopher in the fields of philosophy of psychiatry and moral psychology, is Johns Hopkins’ 45th Bloomberg Distinguished Professor. She holds joint appointments in the William H. Miller III Department of Philosophy in the Krieger School and in the Berman Institute of Bioethics.

Through her applied approach to research, Pickard explores a range of areas, including mental health, addiction, clinical ethics, the self, and criminal law and policy. Currently, she leads a research project titled Responsibility Without Blame, which explores the counterproductive ways society responds to maladaptive behaviors such as crime or addiction.

Pickard came to Hopkins from the University of Birmingham in the U.K., where she was chair in Philosophy of Psychology, and from Princeton University, where she served as a visiting research scholar in cognitive science for the past two years. Previously, she was a research fellow at the University of Oxford and served for 10 years as an assistant team therapist at the Oxfordshire Complex Needs Service, where she worked clinically in an outpatient therapeutic community for patients with personality disorders and other complex mental health needs.

Field Notes: Healing Our Healthcare

Fall 2018

photo of Pavan Patel
[Photo by Howard Korn]

On average, per capita health care expenditures in the United States are twice those of other developed nations, and health care spending accounts for roughly 18 percent of the nation’s GDP—more than $3.5 trillion last year. Senior Pavan Patel, double majoring in public health studies and natural sciences, has come to vividly understand something else alarming: Health care doesn’t operate under the same buyer-seller rules as the rest of our marketplace economy.

“Unlike other industries, health care is not an industry where you necessarily know what you’re going to be paying before you receive services or have a procedure done,” Patel says. “And in other industries, because you know the price, the free market can help drive prices down.”

Since 2017, Patel has spent 10–15 hours a week as a researcher for the Johns Hopkins Drug Access and Affordability Initiative, which develops policy recommendations to control pharmaceutical and health care costs. He has received funding from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, a Houston-based philanthropy, to support his work.

Patel explores the causes and outcomes of health care’s high costs and lack of transparency and develops potential solutions. Most recently, he contributed to a post on the Health Affairs Journal blog looking at a recent health care fix that’s fallen short. Starting this year, the Department of Health and Human Services requires hospitals to place lists of their standard charges for services online.

“But the price lists are very convoluted, and a lot of jargon is used that the everyday consumer wouldn’t understand,” Patel says. “So, it’s hard to calculate what price you’ll actually be paying because you don’t know what codes will be applied to which procedures, and you can’t pick and choose which ones you need to compare to various other hospitals.” However, many ambulatory surgery centers—stand-alone facilities offering elective outpatient procedures—voluntarily offer legible price lists, and Patel and his colleagues looked at them for lessons. “They prove that it’s possible to do it, and it’s very useful,” Patel says. “The hospitals just need to be willing to take a more reasonable approach to transparency.”

Originally a molecular and cellular biology major, Patel has gone all-in for public health and has been accepted into the Bachelor of Arts/Master of Health Science program, where he will earn an undergraduate degree from the Krieger School and a master’s degree from the Bloomberg School of Public Health. “I really enjoy my time with the drug access and affordability initiative,” he says. “I definitely want to incorporate health policy into my career in the future.”

Field Notes: Seoul Searching Summer

Fall 2018

photo of Jessup Jong at the podium
[Photo courtesy of Jessup Jong]

When Jessup Jong was growing up in Seoul, South Korea, and later while serving two years in that nation’s military, the country just 35 miles to the northwest of his home was not viewed kindly. “Both of my grandparents lived through the Korean War,” Jong says. “And, so, we didn’t really have a good perspective on North Korea. We thought of North Koreans as the enemy and that’s what we learned from textbooks.”

But then the senior political science major spent the summer as a policy research assistant at the Harvard Medical School Program in Global Surgery and Social Change, under the guidance of Dr. Kee B. Park, a neurosurgeon who takes medical trips to North Korea. The experience plunged him into complicated geopolitical issues and broadened his understanding of the divided peninsula. “You have to be able to separate the regime, which is a dictatorship, from the people who are living there,” says Jong, recipient of JHU’s Aitchison Public Service Fellowship.

The regime’s human rights abuses are real and need to be called out and addressed, he notes. But important, too, are the pressing humanitarian challenges faced by citizens of the so-called Hermit Kingdom. Much of Jong’s work has been studying the issues and compiling what he learns. “I’ve written policy papers that have been circulated at the State Department as well as the United Nations Security Council,” Jong says. “I’ve also written articles for the public that have been published on NK News and 38 North, outlets for information about North Korea.”

One article for the latter, co-authored with Park, highlighted the street-level suffering caused by United Nations sanctions imposed on North Korea in response to the regime’s ongoing nuclear weapons program. Although sanction exemptions are made for various humanitarian efforts, Jong found that aid to the nation’s most vulnerable people, including pregnant women and the disabled, was blocked or delayed by up to 10 months in 2018. “We’ve seen maternal deaths and severe malnutrition because of these delays and because of the funding gaps,” Jong says. “People have not been getting the aid that they need, though it has improved this year.”

As part of his internship, Jong visited South Korea’s Blue House in Seoul, which is tantamount to our White House. “We pitched a $500 million project to bring medical facilities and infrastructure into North Korea as part of the engagement process with North Korea,” he says. In New York, he met with people from the United Nations Security Council in a closed-door session.

“I’m just very thankful for the hands-on experiences this summer,” Jong says. “When presenting at a medical conference in New York I got to meet the North Korean ambassador—that was a very different experience. Interacting with people who have been in North Korea and worked closely with North Koreans has really opened my mind and helped me put a face to a people.”

Field Notes: Semester Abroad

Fall 2018

photo of Cecilia Howard steering boat
[Photo courtesy of Cecilia Howard]

Conducting scientific research at sea is challenging—you’re isolated, subject to rough weather, and must rely solely on the supplies and equipment on board. Conducting scientific research at sea on a 134-foot brigantine, a type of two-masted sailing ship, is even more challenging. But it can also be a grand adventure.

Senior Cecilia Howard discovered this last spring after spending nearly six weeks aboard the Corwith Cramer, a research brigantine operated by the Sea Education Association (SEA), a nonprofit institute based in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Howard, who is double majoring in molecular and cellular biology and Earth and planetary sciences, participated in SEA’s semester-long Marine Biodiversity and Conservation program. In addition to her time sailing from Key West to New York City (by way of Bermuda), there were also projects and coursework on ocean-focused public policy. After completing the program, she participated in a United Nations panel discussion on high-seas biodiversity. “It was probably the hardest workload I’ve ever had but it was also some of the most rewarding work I’ve done,” Howard says.

While at sea, all students engage in daily data collection, testing the waters for temperature, salinity, and zooplankton diversity, among other things. There are also group projects, and Howard’s focused on Sargassum, a type of floating seaweed. In the open ocean, it creates vital ecosystems, providing food and shelter for all types of animals. For a few years now, however, thick masses of it have been coming ashore in the Caribbean and fouling beaches. Howard’s work involved determining if genetically morphed versions of the plant were to blame and where they may have originated. First, she used a dip net to scoop up seaweed samples.

“We had a whole molecular biology lab onboard the ship, and we would extract DNA and use what’s called a polymerase chain reaction process to amplify genes,” Howard says. “And once we got back to shore, we sent them out to be sequenced and then did a variety of analyses of those sequences to compare the genetic relations between different forms of Sargassum.”

Of course, 35 students and crew living in cramped quarters presented some social lessons. “It really helps learning how to collaborate and get along with everyone,” Howard says. Students take six-hour watch shifts, which sometimes meant the day started at 12:30 in the morning. And on one occasion, Howard’s watch had her scrambling 50 feet up into the rigging. “It was terrifying but so much fun because the entire boat is moving underneath you as you look out on the vast empty ocean around you,” she says.

Field Notes: Giving Back, Giving Thanks

Fall 2018

photo of Deeya Bhattacharya
Deeya Bhattacharya [Photo by Howard Korn]

Senior neuroscience major Deeya Bhattacharya has a supporter to thank for making it easier for her to attend Hopkins. She just doesn’t know who it is. Since her freshman year, she says much of the “financial burden” of tuition has been relieved through an Anonymous Undergraduate Scholarship award. The mystery person can have confidence that their investment is well-placed when you consider all the ways Bhattacharya propels herself into academic and campus life.

Since her second semester, she has worked in the Solomon H. Snyder neuroscience lab at the School of Medicine. Earlier this year, she was among the researchers named on a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examining the role a protein called Histone H2AX has in maintaining the healthy functioning of brain cells.

“Basically, we removed the histone from the genome of some mice and observed how that affected their cells and their behavior,” Bhattacharya says. “What we found was that they were smaller and seemed to have less capability to do things, similar to behaviors that you would see in patients that have degenerative disease over time. My experiments showed that knocking out the histone impaired oxidative phosphorylation.”

And so the study not only increased the general understanding of neural functioning but also has implications for scientists looking to combat diseases such as Parkinson’s. “We started out wanting to find a mouse model for neurodegenerative diseases in the brain,” Bhattacharya says. “And because this histone has to do with metabolism we thought that removing it could have something to do with such diseases.”

When not working with mouse tissues, Bhattacharya can be found making music with the Notes of Ranvier, a campus a cappella group. But there is a neurological connection here as well. The name alludes to the nodes of Ranvier, structures nerve cells use for proper intercell signaling. “It’s funny that the name is a neuroscience pun, but I’m the only one from that major in the group,” Bhattacharya says. The Notes perform in vocal competitions, at benefit performances that have raised over $1,000 to support after-school programs in Baltimore, and at free concerts at nursing homes.

She is also the co-director of the Sexual Assault Resource Unit at Hopkins, which operates a 24-hour, peer-led crisis line, and volunteers at the Family Trauma Center of the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, interacting with children who have either suffered domestic abuse or have witnessed it in their households. “It’s humbling and eye-opening,” she says of her work there.

Five Questions: Kerrie Carden

Fall 2018

Kerrie Carden [Photo by Howard Korn]

In August 2018, Kerrie Carden was named director of student ventures for FastForward U, Johns Hopkins’ hub for innovation and entrepreneurship. The 10,000-square-foot facility features tools, 3D printers, a 2,000-square-foot makerspace, and flexible meeting and work spaces. Open to all students, faculty, staff, and alumni, it served more than 1,000 students in 2018–2019—32 percent of whom were from the Krieger School.

1. What does FastForward U mean to the Hopkins community?

We are a centralized, easy-to-access way for any student—whether curious or committed—to get involved with innovation and entrepreneurship. Hopkins students have a long history of being creative and innovative and really standing as leaders, whether in a movement, campaign, initiative, or business. Our goal is to foster the skills to accelerate that process for students throughout their lives.

2. What impact do you hope FastForward has?

As with anything extracurricular, we offer an opportunity for students to take what they’re learning, and their unique perspective, and turn that into something that has the impact they want to have on the world. College, overall, is about building transferable skills to serve you all your life.

3. What have you noticed in your first year?

Hopkins students have drive and know-how, and they’re building incredible ventures. Entrepreneurship is often a hard and lonely road, so it’s important to have a community around you where you can be vulnerable.

4. What brought you to FastForward?

I moved to Baltimore in 2016 and got connected to JHTV [Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures, the translational arm of FastForward U] as a mentor. I love talking to people about what they’re doing and trying to help them with networking, product development, and sales strategy. When [my predecessor] was leaving this role, he suggested it to me and said, “this is something you’re already doing.”

5. What else do you want people to know?

There is no better time to try something. You have risk-free capital, a structured schedule, and a free and embedded resource that runs right alongside everything you do. Students can think of this almost like the athletic center; it’s included as part of being a student here. Any instance where you find yourself frustrated about something and you have a desire to change it, that’s an opportunity to engage with us.

Major Infatuation: English

Fall 2018

Tell us why you love your major.

People say: You read a lot!
We surely do.
We write a bit
and think some too.

Alicia Badea ’20

For me, the magic of studying English is this: that I begin to know every word in the English lexicon as an intimate and personal friend.

Elvin Meng ’20

English is for anyone who finds beauty in sound and structure and argument, or who values the ability of the written word to accurately capture life as we live it. I love decoding how masters of the language manipulate its twists and turns. Studying English has taught me to apply my relentlessly logical brain to parse any argument, regardless of topic or discipline.

Sabrina Conte ’20

Words are power.

Jack Klein ’20

Sports Bits

Fall 2018

photo of women's cross country team running

Women’s Cross Country

The team was a unanimous selection to win its 12th straight Centennial Conference crown in the coaches’ preseason poll. The Blue Jays have won 11 straight championships since finishing third in 2007.

Women’s Lacrosse

Erin Misner, previously a game day manager for the Women’s Professional Lacrosse League, was named director of lacrosse operations for the women’s team. She also served as assistant coach for Muhlenberg women’s lacrosse and assistant coach for women’s lacrosse and field hockey at Cortland State, helping both teams to SUNYAC titles and NCAA Tournament appearances.

Baseball

Standout relief pitcher Josh Hejka ’19 (Eng) signed a minor league contract with the Kingsport Mets, the rookie league affiliate of the New York Mets. He is the first Blue Jay to sign with an affiliate of a major league team since Andrew Pevsner was drafted by the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2010.

Football

Johns Hopkins earned 16 of 20 first-place votes and grabbed 160 points to earn the top spot in the 2019 Centennial Conference Preseason Football Poll. This is the 11th consecutive year in the top position for the Blue Jays, who went on to win the Centennial title in 12 of the previous 13 years in which it topped the preseason poll.

Wrestling

Keith Norris, head wrestling coach since 2005, received a Lifetime Service to Wrestling Award from the Maryland Chapter of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. Norris has guided the Blue Jays to 88 dual-meet victories and nine top-four finishes at the Centennial Conference Championships.

Women’s Tennis

Ten team members were named ITA Scholar-Athletes, the most of any school in the Centennial Conference and tied for fifth in all of Division III. Hopkins was also named a 2019 ITA All-Academic Team.