Sports Briefs: Spring 2019

Fall 2018

Women’s Volleyball

Matt Troy returned as head coach in February following six seasons at Mary Washington. Having coached the Blue Jays from 2010 to 2012, Troy turned a solid Blue Jays program into a Centennial Conference power; the 2012 team’s 29 wins remain a school single-season record.

Men’s Basketball

Senior Michael Gardner earned Second Team All-Middle Atlantic honors from both the National Association of Basketball Coaches (NABC) and D3hoops.com. He was recently named to the 2019 Reese’s Division III College All-Star Game and is a two-time First Team All-Centennial Conference selection.

Men’s Lacrosse

For the second consecutive week and the third time this season, attackman Joey Epstein was named the Big Ten Men’s Lacrosse Freshman of the Week April 2. His 2.56 goals per game rank third nationally among freshmen, and his 3.67 points per game are tied for seventh among rookies.

Women’s Swimming

Sophomore Mikayla Bisignani received the Elite 90 award for the 2019 NCAA Division III Women’s Swimming and Diving Championship. Bisignani carries a 4.0 cumulative GPA as a double major in molecular and cellular biology and psychology, and is the fourth Hopkins athlete to win the award.

Wrestling

Johns Hopkins posted a national-best 3.776 team GPA to claim the top spot among NCAA Division III teams in the All-Academic Team category. This is the first time Hopkins placed first in the team category and the fourth consecutive year the Blue Jays finished in the top 10.

Women’s Fencing

The team finished in second place overall at the National Intercollegiate Women’s Fencing Association Championship and was the top Division III team. Freshman Miya Herman became the first Blue Jay to win the Julia Jones Trophy, and four Blue Jays earned All-NIWFA honors.

Snapshot: From the Office of Emmy Smith

Fall 2018

photo of objects in Professor Emmy Smith's office

Smith, a field geologist and sedimentologist, is referring to tubular body fossils and strange soft-bodied fossils called Ediacaran biota that are the earliest known forms of macroscopic complex life (see striated shape in lower left­—found in southwestern Nevada) that are about 550 million years old.

Also in her lab are (clockwise) a topographical map; a field notebook in which to record GPS coordinates, sample collection data, and observations; and a Brunton compass, used to measure fault and bedding planes.

“By carefully documenting where these fossils are occurring in sedimentary rocks and collecting complementary geochemical datasets, we can start to piece together a picture of what environments these strange early forms of life lived and died in.”

— Emmy Smith, Assistant Professor, Earth and Planetary Sciences

@JHUArtsSciences: Spring 2019

Fall 2018

In March, @JHUArtsSciences posted a contest on Instagram. Sophomore Jillian Hesler, a visual arts minor, created a caption-less cartoon in a class offered by Johns Hopkins’ Center for Visual Arts. The contest invited the community to suggest captions, and 12 brave souls entered the fray. Chemistry graduate student Sophie Melvin submitted the winning entry.

The Krieger School is active on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Follow us on one or more of your favorite platforms to keep up with faculty, students, current research, and campus goings-on. Just look for @JHUArtsSciences.

 

The Power of Cork

Fall 2018

Think of espionage in World War II, and you likely think of invasion plans or industrial sabotage.

David A. Taylor’s new book, Cork Wars (Johns Hopkins University Press), relates how the buoyant bark of a specific oak, largely indigenous to the Iberian Peninsula, generated surprising wartime significance and intrigue. Taylor teaches in the professional master’s degree Science Writing program that resides in the Krieger School’s Advanced Academic Programs.

Before the advent of plastics, cork was an essential material in the manufacture of products ranging from bottle caps to gaskets. The war to control it was waged from Portugal to California, with Baltimore’s Crown Cork and Seal factory as a key stage in the effort.

Cork Wars traces the fortunes of mogul Charles McManus, whose family owned Crown Cork and Seal, and two other men: Frank DiCara, who grew up in the shadow of the factory and carved out a career there, and Melchor Marsa, who ran the company’s operations in Portugal and Spain and was perfectly placed to be recruited as a spy for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (the predecessor organization to the CIA).

Cork wasn’t just good business in that era. Unrivaled as a sealant and insulator, it was used in gaskets, bomber insulation, and ammunition and was a vital raw material for the war effort. Even before the United States formally entered World War II, a blazing conflagration at Crown Cork and Seal’s Baltimore factory in 1940 became the subject of an FBI investigation into possible Nazi sabotage.

Despite having Freedom of Information Act requests for records on Marsa denied by the CIA, Taylor searched archives of intelligence cables and interviewed Marsa’s daughter to uncover the businessman-turned-agent’s activities during the war years.

Taylor paints a particularly vivid portrait of wartime Lisbon as a neutral crossroads “where both sides were putting out spies.” After Marsa’s recruitment and arrival, says Taylor, the cables coming from Portugal to intelligence officials in the United States “start showing more about the cork industry, and what black markets meant for dealing in both directions,” says Taylor.

Despite Portugal’s perilous neutrality, cork supplies from the region to the U.S. were imperiled by fierce competition and German submarine warfare. A report from the U.S. Commerce Department in 1941 highlighted U.S. dependence on foreign supplies and called for rationing.

So Cork Crown and Seal aspired to transplant cork oaks—and cork harvesting—to the United States. With the help of botanists and foresters, the “McManus Cork Project” was launched to create a new supply of cork oaks on the home front, and discover existing ones.

The company had short-term success in identifying and harvesting cork oak trees across California, including on the grounds of the Napa State Hospital for the Insane. A single season’s harvest of existing stock in the 1940s netted 5 tons of bark.

At its height, the McManus Cork Project also mailed out millions of acorns to Americans to plant on the home front. The effort did not succeed in creating new supplies of cork oak trees for the industry, but the legacy remains. On a recent trip to California, Taylor saw “trees from that campaign still growing on the [University of California] Davis campus … and a couple of trees on the state capitol grounds in Sacramento, also from that period.”

Syllabus: History Meets Social Media Age: #lawsocialjustice

Fall 2018

History, of all things, is a field where a lot of important conversations, developments, and analyses are playing out in the sphere of social media these days. Which means, says Johns Hopkins historian Martha Jones, it’s just as important for professors to teach students social media savvy as it is to teach them content, or research and publishing skills.

So last fall, six sessions of Jones’ History of Law and Social Justice course took the form of Twitter chats. Over the period of an hour, Jones posted 10 questions related to that unit’s reading, and students—along with anyone else who happened to drop in on the chat—responded. The chats were a central element in the course and determined 30 percent of a student’s grade.

“Students are spending increasing time in social spaces online, and I wondered what we were doing to prepare them for this environment. The chats are for exploring the space, to develop a sense of the medium and how it works, and a sense of their own voice and demeanor,” says Jones, Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor of History.

The format definitely made for a different learning experience. Instead of gathering in a classroom, students signed on from wherever they were. The questions were rapid-fire, with a new one popping up every six minutes. Students were required to answer each question, which meant that responses often overlapped, but also that all 20 could fully participate in a way not always possible in a traditional class setting. Responses were limited to Twitter’s 240 characters, which encouraged students to distill their thoughts, though many also learned to “thread” their responses to allow for greater depth. And you never knew who might be listening in, or commenting on your response.

“The coolest thing was to engage with experts on particular cases or to look at sources we hadn’t had a chance to; it brought a different perspective to the material and how we analyzed it,” says senior Juliann Susas.

Before each noontime chat, Jones tweeted an invitation to her more than 8,000 Twitter followers, encouraging them to join her students “for lunch” and including links to the preclass readings. Over the six chats, 34 non-Hopkins affiliates did join in, with engagement ranging from “liking” tweets to gently challenging students. New angles were particularly welcomed by both Jones and her students; during a chat about the Amistad case of 1839, historian and author Jonathan Bryant offered insights from lawyer John Quincy Adams’ personal diaries, which the class had not read, and went on to respectfully prod a student to sharpen her assertions.

For some students, Twitter itself was unfamiliar; only about one-third of the class previously used the platform, mostly following news or culture. Aside from the learning curve of keeping up with the chats, students discovered an untapped resource. “It’s a way to meet people like professors, or others interested in topics I’m interested in, that I wouldn’t have access to otherwise,” says senior Elizabeth Duncan.

Since the chats followed several sessions of class discussion around the unit’s reading, some students viewed them as a kind of quiz. On chat days, junior Miranda Bannister woke up early to reread her notes, and then organized them into paragraphs that could answer Jones’ possible queries. “Then when the chat happened, I had fully formulated thoughts,” Bannister says.

What are you reading?

Fall 2018

Our professors talk about books

 

photo of Andrew Cherlin“Jill Lepore’s These Truths: A History of the United States begins with Christopher Columbus and ends with Donald Trump. Lepore, a professor of history at Harvard and a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine, balances the ideals that Americans have held self-evident since the Declaration of Independence—liberty, equality, sovereignty, consent—and the inequalities that have beset the nation since then: slavery, racial discrimination, the treatment of Native Americans, the rights of women, and so forth. Apart from her historical acumen, Lepore is one of the best writers of long-form nonfiction today, making this a great read.”

—Andrew Cherlin
Benjamin H. Griswold III Professor of Public Policy and Chair,
Sociology

photo of Danielle Evans“I’ve been reading Bridgett Davis’ memoir, The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life in the Detroit Numbers. Davis’ work in revisiting a narrative she only knew part of and fitting new discoveries into her own understanding of her mother is a compelling glimpse of how we turn memory into storytelling. Davis also puts her mother’s life into a broad context, providing a history of the lottery, vivid depictions of Detroit in the 1960s and ’70s, and reminders of the legal and structural constraints that shaped black families’ lives. Her book expands our sense of what counts as a rags-to-riches story, and questions who pays the cost.”

—Danielle Evans
Assistant Professor,
The Writing Seminars

photo of Marina Bedny“My favorite recent read was The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson. It tells the story of the migration of African-Americans from the south of the United States to other parts of the country, including Chicago, and the East and West coasts. One of the things I love about this book is the combination of historical accuracy and personal perspective. The migration is described through the stories of three individuals. The story conveys the injustice and indignity endured by African-Americans under Jim Crow, long after slavery ended, and the hope and bravery that enabled some to flee for a better life in their own country.”

—Marina Bedny
Assistant Professor,
Psychological and Brain Sciences

 

Major Infatuation: Chemistry

Fall 2018

“Chemistry tackles problems in biology, engineering, the environment and beyond. We see it as a bridge that helps us understand the world around us, even down to the small details of everyday life. In the lab, it’s a brilliant combination of technique, logic, and application… and when you get results, it’s especially rewarding!”

Juan Sanfiel ’20

“Chemistry is a way to describe life and our world, shining light on how and why things are the way they are.”

Hannah Korslund ’20

Chemistry in
four words:
Foundational
Dynamic
Beautifully complex

Cassidy Quiros ’20

“Be it determining stereochemistry or deducing different products when a nucleophile attacks from various angles, I love how I can picture everything rotating inside my head.”

Julia Chang ’19

Letters to the Editor

Fall 2018

Our cover story about the year 1968, published in the Fall 2018 issue of Arts & Sciences Magazine, prompted many of our alumni to write in with their own memories of that time. Here are excerpts from some of their letters and emails:

I enjoyed reading Michael Hill’s reminiscence of 1968 in Baltimore and the riots that occurred. I have an indelible memory of the worst night of the riot—April 6, 1968. I was a Hopkins senior and had a part-time job as a producer on two call-in shows on WCBM radio. The hosts were John Sterling, later the voice of the New York Yankees, and the late Gene Burns, later the leading talk show host in San Francisco. Riots had broken out in Baltimore, and the station decided to try to get a black celebrity to come on one of the shows to try to calm things down. They got Ray Scott, a star of the NBA Baltimore Bullets. The problem was how to get him to the studio on N. Charles Street, since the shows were broadcast at night and there was a curfew. I was assigned to drive him to the station and was given a letter from the station manager stating that I was permitted to be out during the curfew on business. I picked up Ray Scott at his apartment. His wife answered the door, and I wondered if the 6’9″ basketball player could fit into my Triumph Spitfire, which was a tiny sports car. Ray was indeed able to get into the Spitfire, and we drove though the empty streets without incident to the station. He had a really effective interview. I can’t remember whether it was John Sterling or Gene Burns who interviewed him, but it was certainly a memorable event for me.

—Lloyd Targer, ’68

Excellent story on 1968—and Chester Wickwire. I attended the Baltimore Center of Antioch College from 1972 to 1974 and was a member of the Maryland Inter-University Writing Seminars, which included Johns Hopkins. I worked at the JHU Alumni Magazine (’75-’76) and then went to the Writing Seminars (’77). This story captures many of my memories.

Please thank Michael Hill.

—Ellen Carter Woodbridge ’77

In April 1968, I was a freshman at Homewood. Classes were suspended when the news of Dr. King’s assassination and rioting in Baltimore hit the campus. Smoke was occasionally visible in the distance.
A Civil Defense representative came to the dorms and asked for volunteers to help staff a relief location at Eastern High School. The site was a place for National Guard troops to rest and be fed; and for displaced people to be accommodated. About six dorm residents, including me, volunteered.

After an incident at the high school, we were transferred to the War Memorial Building. While unloading supplies from a large dump truck at night, we could look up to see the flames from buildings burning nearby. Within a couple of days, we were returned to campus.

—Roger D Moose, AS ’71

As a Hopkins freshman in 1968, I read Michael Hill’s piece with considerable interest and found his insights to be candid and clear, even through the lens of 50 years of hindsight. I was a Hopkins undergrad at the same time, and our paths actually overlapped. Although I don’t recall knowing Mike well, I noted that we shared several “intersections”: namely working at the News-Letter, and interacting with Chaplain Chester Wickwire and John Guess. While there are certainly some unalterable, objective facts about that time, my perspective is somewhat different. I was a “minority within a minority,” a native Baltimorean and black…a “native son,” if you will.

At the time of the unrest in 1968, I was finishing my sophomore year…I was a fully engaged member of the Blue Jay community, not only with studies, but also, the News-Letter (which was a job in itself), work at The Eisenhower Library, ROTC, and Pershing Rifles. At the time, black representation in the undergraduate student body was quite low, and my class, the Class of 1970, having more than ever before (about a dozen students, as I recall). The classes to follow would have greater representation. Black presence on campus was on the “upswing” at the time of the King assassination.

When rioting broke out in the wake of the King assassination, there was considerable consternation in Baltimore which, unlike several other cities, had avoided major urban violence. As Michael mentions in his writing, there was even an article in the March 1968 edition of Reader’s Digest, a “puff piece” entitled “How Baltimore Fends off Riots,” citing “community policing” as an effective deterrent. My biggest personal concern was ensuring that I could avoid the areas where most of the unrest was taking place, navigate my way to and from campus safely, and comply with the curfew. Since some troops were bivouacked at Druid Hill Park, west of Hopkins and not too far from one of my routes home, that was a valid concern. During the curfew there was a surreal, “Twilight Zone,” quality…no people on the streets; traffic lights would cycle in the regular rhythm without a vehicle in sight. On some of the main thoroughfares the only vehicles seen would be a jeep followed by a 2 ½ ton truck with troops patrolling once an hour.

In retrospect, while I acknowledge the impact of the events of 1968 on Hopkins, Baltimore, and the country at large, the Baltimore riot period was a “blip on the screen” for me, as I worked hard to move forward. I did not perceive that time as traumatically as some of my contemporaries who were not natives of the city.

My experiences at Hopkins changed my outlook on life and my perspective from metropolitan to cosmopolitan. I grew in ways that I had not imagined and formed friendships with a wide range of people…some of those friendships exist to this day. Many fond memories remain. I am both proud and humbled to have earned my place as a member of the Hopkins family and will be “Forever a Blue Jay”.

—Charles U. Wood, Jr. ’70

Michael Hill’s article in the Fall 2018 Arts & Sciences Magazine is a colorful and enjoyable picture of student activism at Hopkins a half century ago. In discussing Chester Wickwire, he states that a talk at Levering Hall by Bayard Rustin “got a Ku Klux Klan cross burned on campus.” Mr. Hill wasn’t present for Rustin’s talk on March 20, 1966. I was. I think that the cross burning is just a bit too colorful a detail.

The Klan was certainly on hand. Their behavior was abhorrent. They passed out copies of their newspaper The Fiery Cross. Rustin was his usual amazingly decorous self. But I am unaware of any actual cross burning on campus.

If there is independent documentation that a cross was burned, I politely (if not happily) stand corrected. In the meantime, I prefer to remember the solid dignity of Bayard Rustin’s talk that day, which stays with me after the passing of well over fifty years.

—John A. Leppman, MD ’69

Faculty Awards

Fall 2018

Collin Broholm, Gerhard H. Dieke Professor, Physics and Astronomy, will receive $10.25 million over four years from the U.S. Department of Energy to name JHU’s Institute of Quantum Matter an “Energy Frontier Research Center.” The centers will accelerate scientific understanding in diverse energy-relevant fields.

Chia-Ling Chien, Jacob L. Hain Professor, Physics and Astronomy, was elected Academician of Academia Sinica, one of only five new members in the Division of Mathematics and Physical Sciences. He was honored for his outstanding achievements in condensed matter physics, nanostructures, and spintronics.

Erin Chung, Charles D. Miller Associate Professor, Political Science, and her research team have been awarded a five-year, $1.3 million grant from the Academy of Korean Studies for a lab project on “Local Agency and National Responses to Globalization: The South Korean Case in Comparative, Transnational, and Diasporic Perspective.”

Michela Gallagher, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor, Psychological and Brain Sciences, was awarded the 2018 Melvin R. Goodes Prize for Excellence in Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery. The prize, awarded by the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation, recognizes leading researchers developing treatments for Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.

Timothy Heckman, Dr. A. Hermann Pfund Professor and Department Chair, Physics and Astronomy, was awarded the 2018 Catherine Wolfe Bruce Gold Medal by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. The medal is awarded annually in recognition of a lifetime of outstanding achievement and contributions to astrophysics research.

Rigoberto Hernandez, Gompf Family Professor, Chemistry, received the 2018 SERMACS Stan Israel Award, which recognizes those who have advanced diversity in the chemical sciences and fostered activities that promote inclusiveness. He also received a $450,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to support the Open Chemistry Collaborative in Diversity Equity.

Lawrence Jackson, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, English and History, was awarded the Mystery Writers of America 2018 Edgar Award in the Best Critical/Biographical category for his book Chester B. Himes: A Biography. His book also won the 2018 Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s Literary Award for Nonfiction.

Barbara Landau, Dick and Lydia Todd Professor, Cognitive Science, is among the 84 newly elected members of the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of their distinguished and continuing original research.

Christopher Lebron, Associate Professor, Philosophy, received the 2018 Hiett Prize in Humanities, given to a person “ascending in a career devoted to the humanities and whose work shows extraordinary promise to have a significant impact on contemporary culture.”

Dora Malech, Assistant Professor, Writing Seminars, had four “visual” poems featured in the May issue of Poetry Magazine, and was named the 2018 Baker Artist in the Literary category; the Baker Artist Portfolios support artists and promote Baltimore as a strong creative community.

Barbara Mikulski, Homewood Professor, Political Science, was named honorary co-chair, with Congressman Elijah Cummings, of Baltimore’s 2020 Census Complete Count Committee, which will lead the effort to maximize the city’s participation in the upcoming census.

Yi-Ping Ong, Assistant Professor, Comparative Thought and Literature, received an Honorable Mention for the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize, awarded to an author’s first book manuscript, approved for publication by the Board of Syndics of Harvard University Press and judged outstanding.

Matthew Porterfield, Lecturer, Film and Media Studies, won the top jury prize for an American independent feature at the 2018 Champs-Élysées Film Festival in Paris for his film, Sollers Point.

Ünver Rüstem, Assistant Professor, History of Art, received a postdoctoral associateship and a postdoctoral fellowship in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University.

Joshua Smith, Assistant Professor, Classics, received two fellowships to support his sabbatical: the Loeb Classical Library Foundation Fellowship and the Non-Residential Fellowship in Hellenic Studies from the Center for Hellenic Studies.

James Taylor, Ralph S. O’Connor Professor, Biology, was awarded a $12 million grant by the NIH to develop the National Human Genome Research Institute’s Genomic Data Science Analysis, Visualization, Informatics Lab-space, which aims to create a data resource for researchers.

Elizabeth Thornberry, Assistant Professor, History, was awarded a Davis Center Fellowship at Princeton University for 2018–19.

J.D. Tovar, Professor, Chemistry, was awarded an Invitational Fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

Rosemary Wyse, Alumni Centennial Professor, Physics and Astronomy, has been awarded an honorary Doctor of Science from her undergraduate alma mater, Queen Mary College, University of London.

New Bloomberg Professors Named

Fall 2018

Richard Huganir, a renowned neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins, researches how memory is encoded in the brain. He is the 33rd researcher to join the ranks of the Bloomberg Distinguished Professors and will hold appointments in the Krieger School’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and in the School of Medicine’s Department of Neuroscience.

A member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine, Huganir received his undergraduate degree in biochemistry from Vassar College in 1975 and his PhD in biochemistry and molecular and cell biology from Cornell University in 1982. He served as an assistant professor of molecular and cellular biology at Rockefeller University before joining the Johns Hopkins faculty in 1988. He has been the director of the Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience since 2006.

In 2015, Huganir was appointed director (alongside co-director Michael Miller, a professor of biomedical engineering) of the Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute, designed to promote cooperative research across Johns Hopkins divisions.

Huganir is currently researching the connections between neuroscience and the study of genetics. Through genetic engineering and surgical interventions, for example, his team has been able to observe synaptic activity in the brains of living mice.

He is also at the forefront of a collaborative effort to understand a genetic mutation that is a major contributor to intellectual disability. Mutations in the SynGAP protein, which Huganir discovered in 1998, alter a neuron’s ability to transmit signals across the synapse and cause intellectual disability. Malfunctioning synapses have also been linked to autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and Alzheimer’s disease.

David Sing, a leading expert on exoplanets, joins the Krieger School as the most recent Bloomberg Distinguished Professor. He will hold joint appointments in the school’s Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

Since the first confirmation of an exoplanet in 1995, scientists have identified more than 3,700 orbiting around sun-like stars outside our solar system, ranging from gas giants and super-earths to terrestrial-sized planets.

Sing first began studying exoplanets as a postdoc at the University of Arizona and then continued at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris. In 2010, he joined the University of Exeter, where he became an associate professor of astrophysics.

Using advanced telescopes to observe these orbiting planets, he and colleagues have detected features such as haze and stratospheres, and atmospheric compounds including sodium, potassium, water, helium, and hot hydrogen gas.

The Hubble telescope has been particularly critical to Sing’s research and aided in his landmark 2015 comparative study of “hot Jupiters” across 10 different solar systems. He now heads up the largest Hubble research program on exoplanets.

Sing received his bachelor’s and doctoral degrees in physics from the University of Arizona. At the time, he was already connected to Johns Hopkins, using its FUSE satellite for his PhD thesis on binary star systems.

Tracks: Keone Aliphios

Fall 2018

He wants to improve health care options in his native Guam

Neuroscience major Keone Aliphios ’20 had no hesitation about traveling to the East Coast from his home island of Guam in Micronesia. A high school physics teacher had told him that college was a “good time to be uncomfortable and gain new experiences.” While Aliphios was excited to be accepted to Johns Hopkins, he knew he would miss his island home. But he was determined. His dream? To be a neurosurgeon in Guam.

“A few years ago, my cousin had a brain aneurysm. Guam doesn’t have many neurosurgeons, but lucky for my cousin, one was visiting from Hawaii, and he helped make her better. I have a lot of dreams for Guam.”

Works in Progress (Fall 2018)

Fall 2018

A glimpse at ongoing faculty research

 

Role Playing in Rio

Twenty years ago, two young brothers from a small town in Brazil arrived in a squatter settlement, or favela, on the hills of Rio de Janeiro, scavenged some bricks and tiles, and started building a miniature Rio all their own.

As they constructed their tiny city, called Morrinho, or Little Hill, they began to use it as the setting for a kind of three-dimensional board game, where they and their friends recreated life in Rio.

From the start, the game had a serious edge, says Alessandro Angelini, assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology, who is writing a book about Morrinho. The teenagers used it to make sense of their lives at the city’s social and geographic margins.

“People who perceive Morrinho as play reflect deeply held cultural assumptions about what play is and means,” says Angelini, who lived in the favela for four years during his research. “I saw a perspective on the world in all its messy complexity.”

He decided to study the game by playing it with the neighborhood boys, sometimes using his game piece, or avatar, named “Alex,” and sometimes playing the role of the Morrinho television news crew that reported on violence.

In the course of the game, the boys didn’t simply mimic their neighborhood’s real-life drug raids, dance parties, and love affairs, but spun fictional stories out of them. At the same time, they made the game rules as realistic as possible. Action was improvised in real time, and no one had superpowers. If one of the game pieces died, he or she stayed dead. Morrinho’s ruling ethos was summed up by an adage on some of the model’s miniature billboards: “God Knows Everything But He’s No Snitch.”

Life in the real-life favela was likewise unforgiving. During Angelini’s research, police killed two 17-year-old boys who were working as lookouts for a drug gang that operated in the community. Their favela was among the first in Rio to be occupied by police battling the city’s drug gangs.

In the early 2000s, Morrinho began to draw the attention of the international art world. Its creators were invited to art shows in Barcelona, Paris, New York, and Venice. One of the founding brothers is now the artist in residence at the Morrinho project site, and the other became a singer, or MC, in the Rio funk scene.

Their real-life neighborhood, meanwhile, now has running water, internet service, and bed-and-breakfast accommodations for art-lovers and tourists.

But Angelini says artistic notoriety has not “neatly translated into social uplift for any of the young men or their community.” He plans one more trip to Rio as he completes his manuscript.

Let it Stand

The title of Dora Malech’s latest poetry collection, Stet, means “let it stand”—a word that copy editors use to in

dicate that a marked correction or deletion in a text should be ignored. The title refers to the dual themes of the book: how words can split and recombine, and how a person goes about making and remaking her life.

“I wrote this in a time of many different transitions. Physical transitions. Emotional transitions. Transitions in relationships,” says Malech, an assistant professor in the Writing Seminars, whose work is full of word play and anagrams.

“And I was thinking a lot about what it would mean to make a clean break, quote-unquote, or start over. And more and more, I came to the conclusion that that wasn’t a possibility and is never really a possibility.”

Malech has published three previous collections—Inside & Elsewhere, a chapbook written while she was still a high school student in Bethesda in 1999; Shore Ordered Ocean in 2009, and Say So in 2010. Her work also has appeared in dozens of journals, magazines, and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Poetry magazine, and The Johns Hopkins Review.

Her fourth collection, titled Flourish, is due out in 2020. The poems in that collection will take a more narrative approach than Stet, she says, while meditating on themes of growth and thriving on both the personal and societal level.

Malech is also working on the libretto for Threnos, a choral work in progress by Jacob Cooper, an American composer, and Karmina Silec, a Slovenian artist who works with a choir called Karmina Slovenica. Threnos is Greek for a lyrical lament for the victim in a tragedy, and the work will focus on the killing of animals in slaughterhouses. Malech wrote the lyrics for “Unspun,” one of six songs on Cooper’s debut album, Silver Threads, released in 2014.

She’s been teaching young poets for much of her career, first as co-founder and director of the Iowa Youth Writing Project, through her current work with Johns Hopkins’ Center for Social Concern, and with Writers in Baltimore Schools.

With the latter two groups, she plans to teach a course she developed called Poetry and Social Engagement to Hopkins undergraduates and students from city high schools in the spring.

Seeking Inclusive Excellence

Many American universities have them: those galleries of oil portraits of the school’s founders, presidents, and professors who tend to have two things in common: their gender and their skin color.

“Some call it the Great White Wall,” says Rigoberto Hernandez, the Gompf Family Professor of Chemistry and a theoretical and computational chemist at the School of Arts and Sciences. “It’s important to celebrate the past, and it’s also important to promote the diverse environment that we aspire to.”

Over the past eight years, Hernandez has led an effort to make these academic pantheons more diverse by promoting to chemistry departments nationwide the hiring of women, racial and ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, and members of the LGBTQ community.

He and several colleagues launched OXIDE, for Open Chemistry Collaborative in Diversity Equity, which began staging diversity workshops in 2011. OXIDE’s current research group includes Hernandez and two other members from Homewood’s chemistry department, research scientists Dontarie Stallings and Srikant Iyer.

Many efforts to promote diversity in chemistry faculties, Hernandez says, focus on bottom-up programs to encourage the enrollment of women and minorities through the academic pipeline. OXIDE adopted a top-down strategy of persuading department chairs that key to their success is the creation of a more diverse faculty through recruitment, hiring, and promotion.

By some measures, progress at Johns Hopkins has been slow. There have only been six women professors in the history of the chemistry department, Hernandez says. Today, just two of the 20 members of the chemistry faculty—or 10 percent—are women. There is only one underrepresented minority, Professor Hernandez himself.

The good news, he says, is that Johns Hopkins is committed to diversity. “There is a desire within the university and the department to make a positive change.”

Recently, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation gave a $450,000 grant to OXIDE for the next two biennial meetings.