Alfred Chin ’18, a neuroscience and biophysics double major, is the first JHU student to receive the Astronaut Scholarship, an award founded by the first U.S. astronauts, collectively dubbed the Mercury Seven. The Astronaut Scholarship Foundation encourages students to pursue scientific education in order to keep America a leader in technology.
Jewish Olympics
Michael Wohl ’19 of the men’s swim team and Meredith Shifman ’06 participated in the 20th Maccabiah Games in Netanya, Israel. Wohl won gold in the 4x200m Freestyle Relay. Shifman won silver as goalie on the Women’s Open Field Hockey team. Often referred to as the “Jewish Olympics,” the Maccabiah is an international event for Jewish athletes that started in 1932 and occurs every four years in Israel.
Race in America
Veteran journalist April Ryan spoke at the first JHU Forums on Race in America event of the 2017-18 academic year. Ryan, the White House correspondent for American Urban Radio Networks since January 1997, discussed reporting on the U.S. presidency.
New Part-Time Grad Programs
The Krieger School’s Advanced Academic Programs is offering new master’s degrees in Cultural Heritage Management; Individualized Genomics and Health; Teaching Writing; and Geospatial Intelligence.
50 Years of Provocative Speakers
The Milton S. Eisenhower Symposium celebrates its 50th anniversary. Named after the former university president, the symposium hosts four to five high-profile speakers annually and is organized by students. This year’s speakers include Ohio Governor John Kasich.
Salman Rushdie
Salman Rushdie, authored 12 novels including The Golden House and The Satanic Verses, spoke as part of the President’s Reading Series: Literature of Social Import.
J. Woodford “Woody” Howard Jr., professor emeritus in the Department of Political Science, died in Baltimore on May 19 of complications from dementia. He was 85.
An influential scholar in the field of politics and constitutional law, Howard joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in 1967 as an associate professor. Raised in Prestonsburg, Kentucky, Howard graduated summa cum laude from Duke University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1952. He earned two master’s degrees, one in 1954 and the other a year later, from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. After serving in the Air Force from 1955 to 1957 in Morocco, he returned to Princeton, where he earned his doctorate in 1959. Howard’s areas of expertise were American constitutional law, the judicial process and behavior, law and society, the Supreme Court, and the U.S. Court of Appeals. He taught at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania and Duke University before coming to Hopkins. He was named a full professor at Hopkins in 1969, and he chaired the department from 1973 to 1975. He was the Thomas P. Stran Professor of Political Science until his retirement in 1996.
In addition to a number of influential articles, Howard was the author of two seminal works—Mr. Justice Murphy: A Political Biography, about Supreme Court Justice Frank Murphy; and Court of Appeals in the Federal Judicial System: A Study of the Second, Fifth, and District of Columbia Circuits, which earned him the American Bar Association Certificate in 1982. In 2008, Howard received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Political Science Association.
Carl F. Christ, a professor in the Department of Economics whose career at Johns Hopkins spanned more than 40 years, died on April 21 of complications from cancer. He was 93.
Christ was considered a trailblazer in the field of economics, where statistical analysis puts economic theories to the test.
Born in Chicago, Christ graduated in 1943 from the University of Chicago. He did not initially pursue economics, but physics, teaching it at Princeton and working on the Manhattan Project. But Christ realized he wanted to use his mathematics ability for something that “had more to do with human problems.” He went on to earn a doctoral degree from the University of Chicago and joined Johns Hopkins in 1950, where he stayed for most of the rest of his career, except for a six-year stint at the University of Chicago.
In addition to his pioneering the use of computers to test econometric models, Christ’s area of expertise was monetary and fiscal policy, especially government budget restraint. He authored four books, edited one, and published more than 40 articles in journals and books.
In 2008, when the university established a named professorship in his honor—the Center for Financial Economics’ Carl Christ Professorship—his colleagues described it as an honor for “the legacy of a man who has been an inspirational teacher and mentor to generations of Johns Hopkins students.”
The Stavros Niarchos Foundation has committed $150 million to a joint effort with Johns Hopkins University to forge new ways to address the deterioration of civic engagement worldwide and facilitate the restoration of open and inclusive discourse that is the cornerstone of healthy democracies.
The Krieger School of Arts and Sciences will benefit from the gift, which establishes the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University as an academic and public forum bringing together experts from fields such as political science, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, ethics, sociology, and history. Together, they will examine the dynamics of societal, cultural, and political polarization and develop ways to improve decision-making and civic discourse. They will also design and test mechanisms for strengthening democracy through dialogue and social engagement, and convene experts from a range of perspectives to explore new approaches to divisive issues.
“In the U.S. and around the world, the rise in division, distrust, and alienation presents a daunting and urgent challenge,” says Ronald J. Daniels, president of the university. “Today, cutting-edge research across a range of disciplines—coupled with a commitment to strengthen civic dialogue—can give us new insight into these trends and new opportunities for productive policymaking and problem-solving. The Agora Institute represents an extraordinary commitment to these aims, through a unique combination of scholarship, laboratory, and place-making. We are thrilled to lead the effort and look forward to partnering with scholars and institutions from across the globe.”
The SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins draws its inspiration from the agora of ancient Athens. That central space in the life of the city was originally a marketplace and grew to become a hub of conversation and debate. It was the heart of the Athenian city-state’s democratic governance, and an early manifestation of the public engagement so critical to modern democracies.
“The Stavros Niarchos Foundation is committed to exploring issues that improve the functioning of civil societies today, and the connection to the Greek agora makes this particularly profound for us, since the agora was the heart of civil life, a common space for people to coexist as citizens rather than individuals,” says Andreas Dracopoulos, co-president of the foundation. “We are very excited to partner with Johns Hopkins and strongly believe in the importance of civil discourse, informed leadership, and the role of educational institutions in restoring a more fair and productive democracy.”
The institute will recruit a director and core faculty of 10, who will be joined each year by an additional 10 distinguished visiting scholars. It will engage graduate and undergraduate students in its work and sponsor annual public events in Baltimore and Athens. Among its programs will be an annual series examining a contested policy issue, such as climate change or trade-related job displacement.
“Following the model of the ancient agora, we are bringing together people from different traditions, experiences, and points of view to listen and learn from each other, and come to joint understandings that none could reach alone,” says Beverly Wendland, the James B. Knapp Dean of the Krieger School.
The institute will conduct interdisciplinary research into contemporary vulnerabilities in modern democratic discourse—how citizens are informed, debate, and engage with each other, and with government. It will then partner with public and private stakeholders and technical experts to investigate real-world strategies to ease division and strengthen dialogue.
A new institute building at the university’s Homewood campus will reflect the open character of its namesake, encouraging broad participation and the free exchange of ideas.
The Stavros Niarchos Foundation is one of the world’s leading private international philanthropic organizations, making grants for arts and culture, education, health and sports, and social welfare. In addition to the gift to the Agora Institute, the foundation has made generous donations to other Hopkins entities including Wilmer Eye Institute, the Berman Institute for Bioethics, and the SNF Parkway Theatre.
A long parade of rugged patriots, corrupt politicos, and visionary reformers helped build Baltimore. Yet the metropolis known as “Charm City” has also been a haven for a distinguished line of artists, eccentrics, and malcontents.
Baltimore: A Political History (Johns Hopkins University Press)—written by Matthew Crenson ’63, professor emeritus of political science—provides a comprehensive look at the manifold forces that influenced and impeded city government for more than 300 years.
Crenson also possesses a keen eye—and nose—for the two-way traffic between politics and the body politic. He scrapes away charm (and myth) to expose less savory features of civic history, including the herds of pigs that roamed Baltimore’s streets to dispose of garbage before the outbreak of the Civil War, and the noxious sewage that befouled the city’s air into the 20th century.
As a professor and go-to source for political journalists, Crenson steeped himself in the city’s political history. His Neighborhood Politics (1983, Harvard University Press) was a provocative investigation into how Baltimore’s local conflicts often provide more of a spur to communal action than solidarity.
Crenson says he came to see continuities in Baltimore political life throughout history as more striking than any changes. “What I began to see is the way things stayed the same,” he says. “There are constants in Baltimore political history that just stay there, sometimes for centuries.”
One perpetual battle is the fierce tug of war between Annapolis (Maryland’s capital) and Baltimore. The General Assembly’s long history of denying Baltimore fair representation, or sufficient power to tax or police itself, often led city residents to create quasi-governmental bodies or take to the streets. This latter tactic gave rise to another name for the city that has stuck: “Mobtown.”
Baltimore leaders pursued civic improvements such as gaslight and electrified streetcars. They foresaw the rise of American railroads. Yet Baltimoreans never fully exploited these innovations, and also allowed significant health and safety issues to fester. Baltimore was the last major American city to install a sanitary sewer system.
Crenson says the “city’s political incapacity” hindered progress. “There was political division about the desirability of having swine in the streets,” he says, “and city government was not strong enough and assertive enough to resolve that. Same thing with the sewers. Building a citywide sewer system required a degree of political coherence and integration that the city was not able to achieve until after the Great Fire of 1904.”
That immense conflagration destroyed over 140 acres of the city’s center. Crenson calls it a “great unifying moment” that compelled Baltimore to confront the 20th century. But why didn’t it happen sooner? One reason was Baltimore’s lack of a political machine—such as the Tammany Hall organization built in New York City by William “Boss” Tweed—to centralize power and overcome opposition.
“We had a political machine,” says Crenson. “But it was a feeble machine. They had to make concessions to reformers.” Isaac Freeman Rasin, the key political boss of late 19th century Baltimore, even placed reformers on his candidate lists to “perfume the ticket” for voters.
Avoiding conflict was priority for municipal leaders who grappled with a Mobtown legacy of major riots triggered by politics, secession, and labor unions between 1812 and 1877.
“This weak machine found ways of dealing with points of conflict, substituting bribes and patronage,” says Crenson. “They saw what [Baltimore residents] were capable of in the way of violence, and they found ways to tiptoe around it.”
On the surface, the riots of 1968 and 2015 may appear to be a return to the city’s Mobtown roots. But Crenson says the battles that Baltimore’s black residents have waged for civil rights and long-deferred political influence weave into a much more complex narrative.
Before the Civil War, Baltimore had the highest number of free blacks of any U.S. metropolis. Jim Crow was pervasive and pernicious in Baltimore, but also less violent, in part because its political bosses often chose to suppress black votes by bribing that community’s leaders.
Crenson observes that the city’s racial politics, while fraught, has lacked the nasty edge of other American cities. He cites the 1987 election of Kurt Schmoke as Baltimore’s first black mayor as one example.
“The very fact that we elected our first black mayor without making an issue of race. That’s extraordinary. That didn’t happen anywhere else.”
Baltimore’s political triumphs and failures rest uneasily side by side over three centuries. Or is it that they are inextricably intertwined? Crenson renders his own verdict at the end of his book: “Perhaps it is possible to be Mobtown and Charm City at the same time.”
In Sex, Drugs, and Dynamic Optimization: The Economics of Risky Behavior, discussion topics range from addiction and domestic violence to risky sex and HIV and prostitution. If this doesn’t sound much like an economics class, consider that the field of microeconomics is concerned with how people make decisions, says Nicholas Papageorge, Broadus Mitchell Assistant Professor of Economics, who teaches the class. “Risky behavior is a useful way to understand economics because we think explicitly about dynamic decisions,” explains Papageorge.
Thirty or 40 years ago, this kind of work in economics would still have been novel. But in the ensuing decades, economic studies of topics such as health and education have become more mainstream, says Papageorge. “I think what ties it all together is that we’re trying to think about inequality—not just inequality around incomes, but a full range of differences in the sorts of outcomes that people exhibit.”
“The idea of decisions and outcomes is really the center of economic analysis, and I think that’s why it’s not terribly strange or much of a stretch for us to be thinking about behavioral disparities,” he says.
The class evolved both from Papageorge’s own research around a variety of topics including domestic violence and risky sex behavior amidst HIV breakthrough drugs and his desire to teach his students how to dig in to the technical and complex arguments presented in economics research papers. (He refers to the course as a “humanities-style class in economics.”) The class imitates a seminar, and during the semester, students are responsible for leading discussion, graduating eventually to formulating and analyzing their own formal mathematical models of behavior, the latter a rarity in undergraduate economics courses. Occasionally, Papageorge surprises students with the chance to engage with the authors of their reading assignments, as he did during a discussion on prostitution, when he introduced them to Baylor University economist Scott Cunningham via Skype.
Papageorge says his research suggests that, in many cases, people are quite rational in their decision-making. “People understand the costs and benefits of their actions,” he explains. “And sometimes they decide that the benefits today are worth the costs tomorrow. And the way to change that, maybe, is to make people’s lives better in the future.”
Through analyzing and disseminating economic research on risky behaviors, Papageorge hopes that his students will come to understand that people who are doing things that, at first glance, may appear to be bad choices are sometimes making the best decisions they can, given their circumstances. He also wants students to understand that good policy comes from understanding people’s motivations. Papageorge’s main goal, however, is to teach students to think critically about the world around them, and, he says, “to leave the class a little less judgmental about people who make seemingly self-defeating decisions, not because they’re somehow making a mistake, but because they’re facing a tough set of tradeoffs.”
I just read all the Harry Potter books and thought about how cool Hogwarts was, especially all the things in Dumbledore’s office. So I’m trying to channel the interesting, inspiring, and even weird in my own space. I’m not a Luddite, but you learn things from using older technology, and I like to take students back to when that stuff was new and cutting edge.” Jimmy Joe Roche, Lecturer, Program in Film and Media Studies
Roche’s shelves include a 1960s era Eiki Slim Line 16mm projector, a gift from colleague Karen Yasinsky; a box of DIY special effect camera lenses; and audiocassettes he produces under his own label, Ultra Violet Light. The CD on the middle shelf contains the work of his father, visual artist Jim Roche. The hairy paw is a mysterious acquisition. Roche, an interdisciplinary artist who teaches courses in video and sound production, is at work on his first narrative film, The Skin of Man.
One of the first decisions Peggy Fogelman ’83 made upon assuming directorship of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in early 2016 was to allow cell phone photography in the galleries. A small move, perhaps, but one that speaks to the way that technology has affected the way we experience the world around us, says Fogelman, including the way we view and share art.
It’s a change that might have appealed to the museum’s extraordinary and unconventional namesake. “[Gardner] didn’t believe in the types of minimalist, ‘white-box’ galleries for art that are so common today,” says Fogelman. By combining various art mediums in the same space and eschewing the use of wall labels, Gardner created what Fogelman describes as “a very singular vision of how to experience art and what an aesthetic journey should be.”
The Gardner’s magnificent collection—housed in an equally magnificent building inspired by a Venetian palace—includes painting, sculpture, and textiles, as well as extensive gardens. An additional building, opened in 2012, provides further space for focused exhibitions, as well as spoken word and musical performances. “It’s very much visitor at the center, in terms of finding your own meaning and gauging your own responses to the art,” says Fogelman. “And we’re not going to say that [taking a cellphone photo] is not a legitimate way to experience art—to record it, and through that memory, share it with friends, and come to your own conclusions.”
It was a passing comment by an organic chemistry professor, Fogelman says, that may have contributed to her career in art. Like many Hopkins freshmen, she had declared a premed major, but she also supplemented her course of study with lots of humanities electives, including English and history of art. Fogelman recalls multitasking during lab and reading and writing poetry while she waited for her experiments to come to fruition. “My lab professor told me that I wrote poetry pretty well,” she says. “And of course, my experiment yields were not quite as good, so it seemed like changing majors was the right thing to do.”
Fogelman eventually chose history of art over literature, largely due to Professor Charles Dempsey, a specialist in Baroque art. “The way that he considered art in relation to literature, politics, and art theory just demonstrated how art history was a window into a whole world in terms of the contexts in which artists were working and producing,” she explains. “I just found it incredibly stimulating, and it was very inspiring in terms of my decision to switch majors.”
That switch became the catalyst for an extensive museum career, including a long stint at the J. Paul Getty Museum in California, where Fogelman worked in both the curatorial and education departments. She also served as the director of education and interpretation at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, and as the chairman of education at the Metropolitan Museum of Art before becoming director of collections at the Morgan Library and Museum in 2013.
With almost two years at the Gardner under her belt, Fogelman sees her mission as maintaining and building on the founder’s vision of the museum, which centers on the idea of providing an experience of beauty for a broad, diverse public. Under her helm, the museum will continue to host artists-in-residence and offer a rich roster of public events and performances, as well as build and maintain online catalogs of the collection. Fogelman is also dedicated to inviting new and returning audiences to engage with the art.
“Part of maintaining a collection as vibrant and living is doing everything we can to help people connect with it,” says Fogelman. “Art is very open to our interpretations, and it’s that process of finding our own meaning and emotion that keeps it alive.”
Karen Cheng ’94, co-founder of Star Anise Foods [Photo: Peter Lemieux]
Karen Cheng ’94, co-founder of Star Anise Foods [Photo: Peter Lemieux]
How far is the distance between finance and pho? For Karen Cheng ’94, about four years and 7,500 miles.
In 2005, the Wisconsin native was a decade into a career in finance and living and working in Asia. Cheng was beginning to think about what might be the next professional direction her life would take when she met Thao Nguyen on a hiking trip in Hong Kong. The two women became fast friends, and over the next few years, brainstormed long distance about leaving their respective careers and starting a business together. In 2009, Cheng, now based in San Francisco, called Nguyen, a native of Vietnam who was living in Sydney, with the idea for making healthy pho noodles based on Nguyen’s grandparents’ recipe.
“I had always loved food,” says Cheng, who points to a working trip to Vietnam in 2007 as planting the seed for her new business.
In Saigon, Cheng walked down alleys and back streets discovering stall after stall of intoxicating food. “You would just smell as you go,” Cheng recalls. She was particularly drawn to pho, the traditional Vietnamese dish of bone broth coupled with herbs, meat, and noodles. “It was fresh, delicious, and so simple,” Cheng says, “And the combination of star anise and Saigon cinnamon was super pungent. It just permeated everything.”
The women named their new company Star Anise Foods, as a nod to one of the primary ingredients in pho. And not long after the fateful phone call, Cheng, who was six months pregnant with her first child, and Nguyen, a third generation expert pho maker, spent seven weeks in Saigon meeting with potential suppliers and perfecting their first product: Happy Pho, a do-it-yourself soup mix with no artificial flavors or preservatives that home chefs could create in their kitchen in under five minutes. Their new career as food entrepreneurs was launched.
According to Cheng, Star Anise Foods is the only company making authentic Vietnamese dishes that are gluten-free, non-GMO (food that is made from genetically modified organisms), vegan, and shelf-stable. The Northern California regional office of Whole Foods Market was the first client to pick up the product. Today, nearly a dozen retailers, such as Wegman’s, Mom’s Organic Markets, and Publix, carry Star Anise Food products, and you’ll often find Cheng doing in-store demos of the company’s growing product line which includes noodles, brown rice spring roll wrappers, and Vietnamese simmer sauces.
Starting a business—especially one based in three continents—is a risk, Cheng admits, but she believes in serendipity and taking chances. Not quite 20 years ago, Cheng and her family piled into the car and left her hometown of River Hills, Wisconsin, for an East Coast college tour. Her father missed the exit for Georgetown, got lost on the Beltway, and somehow ended up at Johns Hopkins. No one in her family knew much about the university. Cheng left Baltimore smitten. She applied to only one college—Hopkins—and early admission at that.
In 2003, Cheng, an international studies major, established a scholarship for students like her younger self: in need of financial aid, possessed of a “can do” attitude, an interest in international cultures and arts, and the desire to pursue a non-traditional career. Sounds like the recipe for another successful food entrepreneur.
Last spring, the New York Daily News ran a story about two aging Holocaust survivors living in Queens, New York, who were threatened with eviction by a “predatory” landlord seeking higher rents for their apartments. Both of the seniors had lived in the apartment building for decades, were in failing health, and had no resources to fight the evictions.
A social services agency referred them to the office of Sateesh Nori ’97, attorney-in-charge of the Queens Neighborhood Office of the Legal Aid Society, a nonprofit that provides those living at or below the poverty line with free legal representation in civil cases. Digging into court records, Nori and his team found that the landlord had made numerous errors in previously filed legal papers, and because of these mistakes, the landlord shouldn’t have been entitled to evict his tenants. The judges presiding over the disputes agreed, and the evictions, which were days away, are now on hold indefinitely.
“This [eviction scheme] was meritless and devoid of compassion and humanity,” Nori told the Daily News in a follow-up article last May. “Both our clients deserve a home and a life free of landlord harassment.”
It’s the kind of case that typifies Nori’s career. Since graduating from New York University School of Law in 2001, Nori has fought for the rights of the poor and disenfranchised while working at several legal assistance agencies in New York’s boroughs. While Legal Aid helps people with all types of civil cases, from divorce to credit card debt, Nori has long specialized in disputes involving housing and eviction. His accomplishments were noticed in 2015 by the New York Law Journal, which selected him as one of its “50 Rising Stars.”
“Neighborhoods are changing in New York, and there’s real pressure on the real estate market,” says Nori, 41. “Landlords seek to make more money by charging higher rents to new tenants. This motivates them to push out long-term and low-income tenants who are already living in these apartments. Unfortunately, there is not enough affordable housing to accommodate those in need.”
Nori, who was born in India and moved to the United States with his parents when he was a child, is the first South Asian attorney to direct a borough-wide office of a legal services organization in New York City. It’s an accomplishment that makes him feel particularly honored.
“It’s important because a large portion of Queens is made up of immigrants like me,” he says. “There are 150 languages spoken in Queens. For someone in need to see a familiar and friendly face, I think that’s important. I’m proud to be able to help.”
At Legal Aid, Nori oversees an office of 70 attorneys and paralegals. The organization receives funding from private donations as well as local and federal sources, which have been threatened by cuts proposed by the Trump administration. Trying to do more with less has been one of the biggest challenges during Nori’s managerial tenure at Legal Aid. “The hardest part of this job is to turn people away, to tell them, ‘Sorry, but we don’t have the resources to help you,’” he says. “That’s really frustrating. We need to fight to make access to justice for the poor a national priority.”
For Nori, who says he always wanted to be an attorney, the greatest satisfaction is restoring fairness to an imbalanced legal system that favors those with means. “Representing the poor is one of the more interesting and challenging areas of the law,” he says, “but it also has the bonus of having a real impact on people’s lives.”
Audrey Branch is trying to learn more about aging by studying old and young brains. Specifically, she’s interested in how cells connect to form memories and what might be going wrong with those connections when older people start to forget things.
Until recently, getting at that question meant months of tedious specimen preparation. And even then, the very prep that made getting a glimpse of the brain’s core possible—slicing what’s already tiny into thousands of pieces—likely destroyed the delicate connections the Johns Hopkins neuroscientist needed to see.
That changed last spring when a new, three-dimensional microscope arrived at the university’s Homewood campus, a cutting-edge tool that not only condenses what had been months of work into just hours, but allows university researchers unprecedented views of organs, tissue, and even live specimens.
Just practicing with it, Branch knew it was a game-changer. She cried when she saw the first pictures of a mouse brain, its individual neurons glowing red, and its spindly dendrites, too—showing quite clearly the links between those cells.
“It feels so amazing to see the brain in a way that no one has ever seen it before,” she says. “It’s pretty much the greatest thing I’ve ever experienced in science.”
The selective plane florescence light sheet microscope arrived on campus in April, one of the first in operation on the East Coast and the only one in Maryland. Purchased with a grant from the National Institutes of Health, it cost $360,000.
Unlike other microscopes, this one illuminates specimens from the side, shooting two perfectly aligned planes of light across an object, illuminating a wafer-thin slice of the whole while the camera captures the image—thousands of times over—as the specimen moves through the light. When the images are displayed together, the result is a three-dimensional image or video clip of the full object, sort of like the more familiar CAT scan.
The technology is very new, but Michael McCaffery, director of the university’s Integrated Imaging Center, expects researchers everywhere will be using it within a few years. Just among the Johns Hopkins community, word of the light sheet is already out, and scientists have been lining up to use it.
“People really want to use this,” says McCaffery, a research scientist in the Krieger School’s Department of Biology. “It fills a niche, that until now, was unavailable at Hopkins. Simply, there was no instrument that allowed a researcher to take a whole organ, brain, or cardiac muscle, and image them in three-dimensions, in their entirety.”
The light sheet is the latest advance in modern microscopy—a world that’s been evolving since fluorescence microscopy became the standard in the 1960s.
The new light sheet allows samples up to 12 to 15 millimeters, or about a half an inch. Researchers can study much larger samples, even entire organs. And because the samples don’t have to be cut up, researchers who are interested in how cells, ducts, or veins connect have a chance to observe them, unspoiled.
“It’s a very big deal for researchers, particularly those interested in the science of connectomics,” McCaffery says. “Mapping the neuronal connections of the brain is the holy grail of neurology.”
At Johns Hopkins, we pride ourselves on giving students a classroom experience that is transformational. Lively discussion, mind-bending ideas, and provocative questions are all pretty much the status quo for courses at Hopkins. We know that learning and discovery also take place in our laboratories and libraries, as research is the hallmark of a Hopkins education.
Did you know, though, that learning at Hopkins also happens in some unlikely places? Places like museums, NASA, a federal prosecutor’s office, Vietnam, hospitals, Wall Street. These are just a few of the interesting locales where some of our students have recently held internships or fellowships.
We view internships, scholarships, and unique research opportunities as ways for our students to gain global knowledge and to prepare for successful and fulfilling lives and careers. These experiences augment what students learn in our classrooms and laboratories. Students gain networking and job-searching skills, and deep industry knowledge while also feeding their curiosity about how the world works.
Our Career Center works with corporations, government organizations, hospitals, and nonprofits—to name a few—to help students achieve internships, fellowships, and other experiential education such as job shadowing, networking, and company visits. In addition, the Career Center works with parents and alumni to create internship opportunities that will lead to the career success of students.
Financial support also plays a role. I’m grateful to our donors who contribute to internships and to scholarships for our students. That kind of help enables our students to take the critical thinking and analysis skills they have learned in the classroom and translate them into creative problem-solving and excellence in communication at the places where they have internships.
Students talk about their internships as life-changing experiences. Ramya Prabhakar, Class of 2019, spent this past summer interning at the Terrorism and International Narcotics Unit of the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan. A double major in international studies and political science with her eye on pre-law, Prabhakar said, “This internship made me realize that being a lawyer is not solely about trial time, convictions, or wins. It’s about serving your country by committing yourself to the pursuit of justice.”
Another student, senior Léandre Eberhard, used Woodrow Wilson Fellowship funding to examine whether the substantial investments China makes in African countries increases Africa’s trade with other countries. You can read more about his work in this issue of the magazine, where he says of his experience: “It’s just so different from class work, where you’re given an assignment and you just finish that and then you’re done with it. You have to make your own assignments and ask questions of yourself without knowing if there’s a correct answer. I’m really glad that I’m able to do this before actually being a graduate student or a PhD student.”
These are just two examples of the impact that internship and scholarship funding have on the career directions of our students. We are teaching them that, with willingness and an open mind, learning can happen just about anywhere in the world. And once they realize that, there is no stopping them.
This is a very interesting tension. This is why we play the game. We look for something not fitting.” Adam Riess
Bloomberg Distinguished Professor and Thomas J. Barber Professor, Physics and Astronomy The New York Times, February 2017, on the differing scientific views about how quickly the universe is expanding.
Women are tired that different rules are applied to us in a different way when we claim our power.” Retired Senator Barbara Mikulski
Homewood Professor, Political Science CNN, February 2017, on Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) being rebuked by Republicans for a speech questioning the attorney general nominee.
Over the years, we’ve seen the overall poverty rate decrease, but the problem of deep poverty has gotten worse.” Robert Moffitt
Krieger-Eisenhower Professor, Economics The Atlantic – CityLab, February 2017, on his study showing that teenagers go without food twice as often as their younger siblings, due to limited food in the household.
When it comes down to it, what people seem to want more than anything else is dignity.…but a lot of our social policies deny people that.” Kathryn Edin
Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, Sociology, Public Health Add Passion and Stir [podcast], April 2017, on how current economic, geographic, social, and political systems do not adequately serve the poor.
It is reasonably well-accepted that a current generation of climate models is missing the essential physics in representing the AMOC.” Thomas Haine
Morton K. Blaustein Chair, Earth and Planetary Sciences The Washington Post, January 2017, on the concern that climate models inaccurately represent the instability of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, which could affect climate predictions researchers make.
J. Woodford “Woody” Howard Jr., professor emeritus in the 
Carl F. Christ, a professor in the 
A long parade of rugged patriots, corrupt politicos, and visionary reformers helped build Baltimore. Yet the metropolis known as “Charm City” has also been a haven for a distinguished line of artists, eccentrics, and malcontents.
