For American-educated scientists and engineers practicing in the global realm, there is no time for language barriers. One Krieger School program has a solution.
Entering its fifth year, the Johns Hopkins-China STEM program is responding to the growing demand at Hopkins and around the world for Chinese language training in technical fields. Designed for English-speaking engineering or health sciences scholars with a strong foundation in Mandarin Chinese, the intensive, eight-week summer program takes place at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center in China.
“Students dramatically improve their Chinese language skills and gain valuable knowledge about contemporary issues related to engineering, public health, and medicine in China,” says Tobie Meyer-Fong, professor in the Department of History and one of the program’s founders. “Our director, Ningping Yu, connects students to opportunities that match their interests—be it technological invention, infectious diseases, health care delivery to migrant workers, nursing, traditional Chinese medicine, aeronautical engineering, or pharmacology.”
The program is not limited to Hopkins students, but Krieger School alumnus Mike He ’14 says it helped him take the next step in his career path. “I had always been interested in Chinese culture, and as a public health major, I felt the program would be a perfect fit for me.”
During his time in Nanjing, He collaborated with scientists on editing and translating papers. This past summer he received a master’s degree in environmental health sciences from JHU’s Bloomberg School of Public Health and returned to Nanjing for an internship at the Department of Food Safety and Inspection.
“Taking part in the China-STEM program was one of the best decisions I ever made,” says He, who is now pursuing a doctoral degree.
By training professionals who are fluent in Chinese, “the program serves our national interest,” says Meyer-Fong.
Lights, camera, action! While synonymous with Hollywood, these words now also have powerful relevance for Baltimore with the opening this semester of the $10 million Hopkins-MICA Film Center. The education and film production complex is co-managed by Johns Hopkins University and the Maryland Institute College of Art as a home for their film programs, which have been collaborating for several years now. Composition and recording arts students from Hopkins’ Peabody Institute also use the building.
The roughly 25,000-square-foot facility occupies the entire second floor of the renovated Centre Theatre complex on North Avenue in the Station North Arts and Entertainment District, about a mile south of the Homewood campus. The state-of-the art facility includes screening rooms, classrooms, a professional-grade recording studio and sound stage, numerous editing suites, a large computer lab, and a substantial upgrade in the quality and quantity of film equipment available for student filmmakers. Flat-panel TV screens line hallways and dot lounge areas, allowing for the constant showing (and critiquing) of student films and works in progress.
“I don’t usually like to use a term like ‘game-changing,’ but this is really huge,” says Linda DeLibero, director of the Krieger School’s Program in Film and Media Studies. “We have always had a great film program, and our students have gone on to do really impressive things in the industry, but I honestly think this puts us in league with the best film programs in the country.”
Just one block west on North Avenue sits the historic Parkway Theatre, which is being renovated by Hopkins and the nonprofit Maryland Film Festival into the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Film Center. It is slated to open in 2017 as a three-screen, 600-seat film complex with additional facilities for student use.
“While our film program has been growing exponentially these last few years, it has always sort of been under the radar—but not anymore,” says Roberto Busó-García, director of the new master’s degree in film and media, also debuting this year. “Now we’re adding the resources to grow it further and as part of the push to make film, television, and other media a meaningful part of the Baltimore economy.”
Meanwhile, enrollment in the undergraduate film major expanded threefold this fall, and Busó-García says interest in the new graduate program, which includes concentrations in business, sound, and screenwriting, has been strong. “We’ve been inundated with applications,” he says.
“Between the Hopkins and MICA undergraduate and graduate programs, we’re going to have at least 100 people in the center at any given time of day,” DeLibero says. “And having filmmakers come in and present their work and teach and get exposed to the students is going to change their ideas of where Baltimore is in terms of film and the arts. I would love to see this be the catalyst for the city becoming a true center for filmmaking. Really, the sky is the limit.”
Filmmaker Matthew Porterfield, a faculty member in the Film and Media Studies Program, teaches a class in a green screen studio room and sound stage.
At the end of 2007, when Paul Power ’79 (PhD) entered what he terms “semiretirement” from a Melbourne, Australia, management consultancy, he anticipated some much-deserved downtime. He had spent 40 years working as an organizational psychologist, teacher educator, and teacher. The last thing he expected was to embark on a new career.
A tour of Latin America, however, changed everything. While in Ecuador, he and his wife, Kim, a psychologist and theologian, went to the rural town of Guamote, a regional hub for the nation’s indigenous population. There, they visited a center that attempts to keep girls in school rather than having them be withdrawn to work in the fields or care for younger siblings while their mothers work in the fields. The center particularly resonated with Kim, whose mother left school to help support her family during the Great Depression.
Kim and Paul Power ’79 visit with girls in India whose education is funded through the Powers’ Sunflower Foundation.
The experience inspired Power and his wife to start the Sunflower Foundation, an international effort to educate girls in struggling nations. To date, Sunflower has partnered with local aid groups in India, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Australia, and other nations to administer programs that educate girls.
In a phrase, Sunflower “seeds hope,” says Paul Power (now 75—and the foundation’s secretary) via Skype from his home just outside his native Melbourne. “Our mission is to provide a future for girls in disadvantaged communities through education because recent research shows that if you want to improve the economy of developing countries, you educate the girls; if you want to improve health in some of the same countries, you educate the girls; if you want to improve the lot of families, you educate the girls; everything comes back to educating the girls.”
Sunflower jibes neatly with Power’s working-world career. After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education at the University of Melbourne, he spent four years teaching high school, then 10 in teacher education at the university level, before earning his PhD in vocational psychology from the Social Relations Department (now Sociology) at Johns Hopkins. In 1984, Power switched gears, working as an organizational psychologist with a series of management consultancies, allowing him to put into practice what he had studied at Hopkins with Professor John Holland. “He taught me things that have served me well in everything I’ve done since,” Power notes. (Together, Power and Holland wrote My Vocational Situation, an assessment device used worldwide.)
Then came Sunflower. In India, the group funded a program that educates dalit girls. (More than 160 million people in India are considered dalit or “untouchable” based on their birth into a caste system.) In Uganda, Sunflower provided the resources to train young women as primary school teachers in rural areas. In Sri Lanka, it helped refurbish a classroom; provided desks, reading and writing materials; and paid the salary of a teacher of English.
“The money goes a lot further in developing countries,” Power points out.
All the Sunflower activity has put a crimp in his plan to take it easier in semiretirement: “We’re almost back in full-time jobs,” he jokes. (Kim serves as the organization’s president.)
For Power, it’s worth every minute. “It’s knowing that you are making a difference,” he says. “It’s seeing in India the dropout rate in the schools in these villages has gone from between 25 to 30 percent to zero in two or three years. It’s seeing in Uganda these young girls who were just thrown into the deep end to teach in primary schools are now able to say: ‘I have a certificate; I’m a qualified person.’ It’s seeing the faces of these young girls, hearing them talk about the hopes and aspirations that they have for a future that their parents never would have considered.”
I feel I’m spending roughly half my time hiding in plain sight because I used to be something. And the other half of the time I feel still so hard pressed to the national bosom that I’m suffocating. So I’d quite like to go and live in America.”Sir Andrew Motion BBC News, May 2015, on why, as England’s former poet laureate, he decided to take a position at Johns Hopkins
The most disadvantaged dads end up looking like they’re completely distanced from their kids, but they’re actually giving quite a lot. I was surprised by how much these disadvantaged guys, these truly marginally employed men, are putting all of this thought and what little resources they have into showing their children that they care.”Kathryn Edin
Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, Sociology Time magazine, June 2015, discussing so-called deadbeat dads
We’re pushing more activity out of the regulated banking sector, and so monetary policy has to take account of the unregulated sector. The world is changing, and I think the bigger risk is not changing along with it.”Jon Faust
Louis J. Maccini Professor of Economics The New York Times, September 2015, discussing Federal Reserve’s ability to raise interest rates
A ‘good’ lynching poem must capture and represent the horror of a specific event. It must trigger strong feelings and perhaps rage. Moreover, a good class discussion must address politics: not only the politics of lynching, but also the literary politics of creation and publication. Who writes about lynching and when? Who publishes the work and why? In short, the endeavor is not for the faint of heart.”Hollis Robbins
Director, Center for Africana Studies Chronicle of Higher Education, August 2015, on teaching literature about lynching
Like a flock of birds or a school of fish, electrons acting in tandem create patterns and behavior that are more than the sum of their parts.”
Tyrel McQueen, Associate Professor
The McQueen Lab and Institute for Quantum Matter produce novel materials, such as these crystals of the cubic zirconia analog Pr2Zr2O7, in which macroscopic quantum entangled states “emerge.” The lab’s research focuses on the discovery of this emergent behavior through the design of new synthetic methods for the creation of new materials.
At this time about a year ago, my work days were pretty predictable. Every morning my husband and I would load up our two dogs in the car and drive down I-83 to the Homewood campus. Once on campus, I would head to Mudd Hall, where I’ve been a faculty member (and more recently chair) in the biology department since 1998. My husband, Michael McCaffery, set off to the university’s Integrated Imaging Center. He is director of that center as well as a research professor in biology.
I loved my job. My days were spent conducting research on fundamental cellular processes using yeast cells, engaging with our remarkable students in the laboratory and classroom, and collaborating with faculty colleagues. When I was tapped last summer to be interim dean, I was honored and open to the opportunity to learn new things. I thought it would make for an interesting few months, and then I would return to my “real” life. Well, things didn’t quite turn out that way.
Being the interim dean of the Krieger School gave me a whole new view of this amazing institution. I got to know faculty members from other departments with whom I had never worked before or in some cases even met. I learned about exciting projects underway, like the new major in medicine, science, and humanities. I witnessed the passion students have for fields I never had a chance to explore before, such as museum studies and economics. The more I came to understand the seemingly endless breadth and reach of the school, the more I wanted to immerse myself in it. And so, after a great deal of deliberation, I threw my hat in the ring in the search for a new dean.
I knew I would be up against many extraordinarily qualified candidates. I’ll spare you the details of the strenuous interview process, but suffice it to say, when President Daniels offered me the position I was honored, humbled, and overjoyed, all at the same time.
As the newly named James B. Knapp Dean, my job now is to begin formulating a vision for the School of Arts and Sciences. Discussions with the president, the provost, our vice deans, faculty members, staff, and students have already led to the start of some long-term plans, and I want to share some of those with you.
One of my primary goals is to seek new opportunities for interdisciplinary innovation. By linking areas of expertise across disciplines, we lay the groundwork for creative discovery. We’ve already forged some unique partnerships with other divisions within Hopkins, most of them catalyzed by the Bloomberg Distinguished Professors, but so many more possibilities exist. One of our critical missions is to prepare our students to be leaders in the world. When our students—and their professors—are given the tools to explore ideas beyond the limits of their chosen fields, everyone thrives.
Another priority of mine is to explore innovative, effective ways to increase diversity within the Krieger School, particularly among our faculty. When our students graduate, we are sending them out into an extraordinarily multicultural world. No matter what their backgrounds, in order for them to succeed, they must be able to understand points of view, histories, sensitivities, and experiences other than their own. I’ve begun having conversations with professors, staff, alumni, and students to gather ideas about how we can shape the Krieger School faculty to be a more accurate reflection of the world around us.
A third goal I have is to shine a brighter spotlight on our outstanding humanities programs. In recent months, there have been numerous stories in the press that are “defending” the humanities; we need to stand up against this defensive posture and unapologetically proclaim their value. Now, perhaps more than ever before, a robust liberal arts education is the key to successful careers and fulfilling lives, and the humanities play a starring role. Our students who study the humanities graduate with the kind of expertise that every field needs: excellent writing skills, critical thinking and decision-making skills, the ability to ask intelligent questions and to communicate complex ideas. Study of the humanities gives all our students significant life skills that will enable them to succeed, no matter what their chosen major or future career path.
The Krieger School of Arts and Sciences is a leader in so many fields, and represents so many “firsts” in defining disciplines and areas of study. I want us to be known around the world as the standard-bearer in all of the disciplines we pursue while also breaking new ground by birthing the next generation of firsts.
I have now been the James B. Knapp Dean for about four months, and each day I still uncover new evidence of the Krieger School synergy that always has and always will lead to new knowledge. So, yes, my life has changed dramatically from this time last year—and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
From Jeff and Shari Aronson’s perspective as volunteer leaders at Hopkins, bringing the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and SAIS (JHU’s School of Advanced International Studies) together in closer collaboration would enhance both schools’ capacities to develop solutions for intractable world problems and train new generations of global experts.
All that was missing was a structure to encourage that collaboration, so they established the $10 million Aronson Center for International Studies.
“Our goal is to build a stronger bridge between two great Hopkins schools,” says Jeff Aronson ’80 and chair of the university’s board of trustees. “The Aronson Center will bring together a greater variety of faculty experts to collaborate on thorny problems in international studies and make the world a more just and peaceful place. At the student level, the center will provide even greater opportunities for young people to learn from and work with the very best thinkers—and doers—in the field.”
In announcing the gift, Hopkins President Ronald J. Daniels said, “Jeff and Shari’s visionary gift reflects their unwavering dedication to Johns Hopkins, their perceptive evaluation of a key area for our growth, and their support for One University, our initiative for creating greater connections among our campuses. The Aronson Center will bring new resources and attention to our work in international studies and increase the global impact of our faculty and students.”
The primary connection between the Krieger School and SAIS today is that undergraduate international studies majors have the option to pursue a five-year BA/MA degree through SAIS, ranked as one of the top schools of international relations. With campuses in Washington, D.C., Bologna, Italy, and Nanjing, China, SAIS draws students from around the world and provides them with a global perspective during their graduate experience.
The new center will bring the schools closer together, providing three components:
The Aronson Distinguished Professorship will support a senior academic scholar with a dual appointment in both schools, who will guide cross-disciplinary efforts and pursue a focus on topics related to the Middle East.
The Aronson Professorship will support an expert in international relations and comparative politics, international economics and social development, or conflict resolution; have a dual appointment in both schools; and partner with the distinguished professor to develop new approaches to the theory and practice of international relations. Both new Aronson professors will teach one undergraduate course per semester.
The Aronson Center Endowed Fund will support new undergraduate intersession and summer experiential learning trips; enhance undergraduate experiences in Bologna, Nanjing, or other destinations; and provide funds for symposia, for Krieger School undergraduates to study at SAIS, and for shared projects.
“Beyond the immediate advantages of two professorships and an endowment, the Aronsons’ insightful gift will allow the Krieger School and SAIS to leverage a Bloomberg Distinguished Professorship, thereby strengthening the partnership between the two divisions even further,” says Krieger School Dean Beverly Wendland. “The Aronsons’ gift is a remarkable one in that it opens the door to so many possibilities.”
“With the Aronsons’ generous support, SAIS will benefit from two new faculty appointments, new opportunities to interact as partners with Krieger School colleagues, and improved capacity for evidence-based research,” says SAIS Dean Vali Nasr. “The Aronson Center will add greatly to the reputation and academic excellence of SAIS and Krieger and firmly establish Johns Hopkins as the destination institution for the study of international relations at all levels.”
The Aronsons’ insights on more closely linking the two divisions come from decades of volunteering in service to the university; contributing in support of professorships, scholarships, internships, and capital enhancements; and enjoying the academic successes of their two daughters, Marni ’13 and Nicole ’15. In addition to serving as chair of the university’s board of trustees, Jeff Aronson is a Johns Hopkins Medicine trustee and a member of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences advisory board. Shari Aronson is a member of the advisory board of the Washington-Baltimore Program in Social Policy at the Krieger School.
Following the Man of Yamhad: Settlement and Territory at Old Babylonian Alalah Boston/Leiden:Brill By Jacob Lauinger, Assistant Professor, Near Eastern Studies
A study of the cuneiform texts from Bronze Age Alalah that record the purchase or exchange of entire settlements.
The Young Spinoza: A Metaphysician in the Making Oxford University Press Edited by Yitzhak Melamed, Professor, Philosophy
This text of 20 essays from various scholars traces the development of one of the world’s greatest philosophers.
It’s Hard to Say: Selected Poems Waywiser Press (UK) By Mary Jo Salter, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor, Co-chair, Writing SeminarsA compilation from Salter’s seven previous collections demonstrating a wide range of emotion.
Rural Archaeology in Early Urban Northern Mesopotamia: Excavations at Tell al-Raqa’i Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, UCLA Edited by Glenn Schwartz, Whiting Professor of Archaeology, Chair, Near Eastern Studies
Results of the extensive excavation of a small, rural village in the early to middle third millennium B.C.
State Capitalism, Institutional Adaptation, and the Chinese Miracle New York: Cambridge University Press Edited by Kellee S. Tsai, Professor, Political Science
Issues pertaining to China’s economy, politics, history, and society are explored by leading scholars and researchers.
Ethylin Wang Jabs combines laboratory research with clinical practice at Mount Sinai Health Systems in New York.
For nearly 25 years, Ethylin Wang Jabs ’74 has been a mutation hunter. Her ultimate goal? To improve life for the hundreds of children born each year with facial deformities, by finding genetic causes and developing drugs for prevention and treatment.
Through tens of thousands of hours in the lab, Jabs has helped identify the genetic variants that are responsible for a number of rare craniofacial disorders. She and her colleagues have spotted the genes that underlie oculodentodigital dysplasia (a syndrome characterized by small teeth, small eyes, and a fusion of the fourth and fifth fingers); Miller syndrome (a condition marked by sunken cheeks, an underdeveloped lower jaw, and often a cleft palate); and keratitis-ichthyosis-deafness syndrome. Her studies have pointed the way toward new avenues for prevention and treatment—and they have also shed light on fundamental molecular pathways that govern embryonic development.
Since 2007, Jabs has pursued this work at the Mount Sinai Health Systems in New York, where she is a professor of genetics and genomic sciences. Before then, however, she had spent her entire career at Johns Hopkins. Indeed, she was steeped in the culture of Hopkins from early childhood. Her father, Shih Yi Wang, was a professor of photochemistry at Hopkins’ School of Public Health. Jabs entered Hopkins in the fall of 1970, as part of the first class that included women.
“I felt accepted in every way,” she says. “This may not have been every woman’s experience that year, but there was no one discouraging me. I felt like I had every opportunity in front of me.”
Jabs initially planned to major in mathematics but soon found her interest turning toward medicine. At the end of her sophomore year, she was accepted into what was then known as the two-and-five system, which allowed students to earn a bachelor’s and then a medical degree (from the School of Medicine) within a single seven-year program.
“People in my family had been PhD scientists, but there were no physicians,” she says. “I had no real idea of what it meant to be a doctor until I went down this path.”
Somewhat to her surprise, Jabs discovered that she loved the daily rhythm of clinical work: getting to know patients, comforting family members, explaining complex medical conditions in plain language. At the same time, however, she found that she loved doing basic science in genetics laboratories. After completing her residency in pediatrics at Johns Hopkins Hospital, she did a fellowship in the laboratory of Barbara R. Migeon, a pioneering medical geneticist who has taught at Hopkins since 1962.
“Ethylin was very aggressive in the lab—and I mean that in the best possible way,” recalls Migeon. “She defined her scientific problems and went right after them. She didn’t worry about boundaries. If she read that some lab in England or France had done something interesting, she’d get on the phone and ask them about their work.”
By the end of her fellowship, Jabs found a way to marry her laboratory work with her love of the clinic: She decided to work with children with craniosynostosis, cleft palate, and other craniofacial disorders. Those syndromes sometimes have environmental causes related to fetal exposures to toxins, but many of them are caused by discrete, rare mutations.
“I loved working with those patients,” she says. “I slowly collected a biobank of DNA samples, and once that was in place, we were able to isolate a number of genes.” By the mid-1990s, Jabs had become one of the most prominent scholars in the field, and the Hopkins Center for Craniofacial Development and Disorders had become one of the best-known treatment sites.
“I’m so appreciative that I’ve been able to be a part of this work,” Jabs says. “When you’re in the middle of it, you’re working so hard that you can’t actually relish the moment until much later on.”
Today in New York, Jabs is as busy as ever. Her lab at Mount Sinai is collaborating with researchers at the National Institutes of Health on genetic studies of Moebius syndrome, a rare condition in which infants are born with no ability to move their facial muscles. She is also doing studies on mice to assess the potential of certain drug compounds to prevent and treat craniofacial disorders.
Jabs is married to Douglas Jabs, an ophthalmologist whom she met when both were medical students at Hopkins. Their daughter, Alexandra Jabs ’11, is now a student at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, where her grandfather once taught.
“I’ve been very lucky to have been able to be at the beginning of things,” Jabs says. “When I was a student at Hopkins, genetics was a small discipline, full of patients with rare diseases. But now genomics is embedded in every single medical discipline. It’s everything.”
When people learn that Dave Leonhard ’62 once played Major League Baseball, they often respond jokingly, as in, “Boy, the Red Sox could sure use you now,” Leonhard relates. Not that he ever was a member of the Sox—Leonhard spent six seasons, 1967 through 1972, as a pitcher for the Baltimore Orioles—but he lives and works outside Boston.
Leonhard’s tenure with the Orioles coincided with the team’s glory years, including three consecutive trips to the World Series (1969–1971), in which he appeared twice (1969, 1971).
In a sport preoccupied with statistics, Leonhard represents a remarkable—and remarkably improbable—footnote: He is one of only two Johns Hopkins graduates ever to play at the major league level. (The other, Otis Stocksdale, played for four seasons, including one with the Orioles, in the 1890s.)
Leonhard arrived at Johns Hopkins in the fall of 1960 as a junior transfer student from Washington College in Chestertown, Md., and he decided to major in history.
NCAA rules require transfer student-athletes to forgo participating in sports for one year, so Leonhard did not join the Blue Jays baseball team until spring 1962. (He also played basketball for Hopkins as a senior.)
A self-described “horrible” pitcher in high school, Leonhard improved at Hopkins. A right-handed starter, he won three games while losing two, on one occasion pitching 13 innings and striking out 18 batters. Nonetheless, upon graduation, no professional scouts showed interest in him; that neither surprised nor bothered Leonhard, given that he never had entertained any illusions about playing pro baseball.
That summer, he and some friends participated in a Baltimore-area amateur league, paying for their own equipment and uniforms, and in the fall, he began teaching American history at a local high school.
During the academic year, Leonhard bumped into an Orioles scout who’d seen him pitch the previous summer. To Leonhard’s astonishment, the scout offered to sign him to a contract with the team. Unconvinced of his own talent and with a commitment to teach through June, Leonhard at first demurred, relenting only when told that he could pitch that summer for a monthly stipend in the Orioles’ low-level program.
Come fall, he took a job as a social worker, resuming baseball activities in the minor leagues for the Orioles in spring 1964. Over the next several years, he pitched impressively, rising rapidly through the team’s farm system until he made his debut with the Orioles in 1967.
“It was a wonderful way to make a living,” recalls Leonhard of his professional baseball years. Today he and his wife run a thriving nursery outside Boston. [Photo: Billie Weiss]
Leonhard’s Hopkins degree earned him the sobriquet of “The Professor” from his Orioles teammates, whom he quizzed about U.S. history during games, “just horsing around.” But overall, he adds, players did not treat him differently because of his JHU education.
Never a star, he won 16 games and lost 14 during his Orioles tenure, pitching as both a starter and reliever. While his team’s two appearances in the World Series will remain golden memories for Leonhard, he says, “there was a lot of stress in pitching for me because I was always struggling to make the team, and always felt that every pitch could be my last if it wasn’t a good one.”
Leonhard spent the 1973 and 1974 seasons back in the minor leagues, first for the Orioles and then, after being traded, with affiliates of the California Angels and Chicago Cubs, eventually moving on to serve as pitching coach and sometimes pitcher for two years with the Quebec Carnavals, a Montreal Expos farm team.
“I liked it, but even in the big leagues, coaches were making only $10,000 to $15,000—the most money I ever made as a player was $25,000—and you were subject to being fired at any time,” he explains. “It didn’t seem like a great career path to me.”
A more secure career path materialized while Leonhard still coached and played in Quebec. In May 1975, he and his wife, Doris, bought a foundering flower shop and plant nursery in Beverly, Mass.
Together, the couple replaced greenhouses, added two wings to the main building, and over the past 40 years, transformed the place into a thriving full-service operation.
Business varies wildly. “There are times in May and June and December when we work 12- to-14-hour days,” Leonhard says. “It’s a nightmare. Everyone wants their Christmas tree decorated at the same time, and everyone wants to plant at the same time in the spring.
“On the other hand, the other nine months of the year, you’re working in a fabulous environment: sunshine streaming through the greenhouses, me dressed in my bathing suit in the summer or sweatshirt and sweatpants in the fall.”
Meanwhile, Leonhard retains a palpable fondness for his unlikely Hopkins-to-the-major-leagues baseball past. “It was a wonderful way to make a living,” Leonhard remembers, citing the attendant exercise and the camaraderie. “I was playing a game that I’d paid money to play before and now, they were paying me.”
Laura Ferrarese ’95 PhD says she pursued her graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University at just the right time. It was the early 1990s, and the Hubble Space Telescope was sending its first images back to Earth.
“You would get to work in the morning, look at the data that had just been taken, and you knew you were the first person to ever see those kind of details, to ever look at those galaxies with that resolution,” says Ferrarese. She was particularly fascinated by the early images HST was taking of the Virgo Cluster, the largest collection of galaxies closest to Earth. “No one else had ever seen it. For a few moments, you were the only person in the universe to ever have that kind of experience. It was so exciting, especially for a student.”
Twenty-five years later, Ferrarese is still fascinated by the mysteries of the Virgo Cluster. She now serves as principal investigator for the Next Generation Virgo Cluster Survey (NGVS), a multinational project involving astronomers from 45 universities and research institutes across North and South America, Europe, and Asia.
“It’s a massive undertaking and involved a lot of observing time,” says Ferrarese, whose team spent five years and nearly 1,000 hours of observing time on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, between 2009 and 2013. “But we were able to image the cluster in its entirety, very deeply, and with good resolution. By doing this, we were able to discover very faint, small galaxies that up to now had only been detected and studied in the neighborhood of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, or its closest companion, Andromeda. Now we’re exploring a completely different part of the sky in a completely different environment that is over 20 times farther away.”
The project has already yielded fruitful results: Ferrarese says astronomers had only identified approximately 1,600 galaxies in the Virgo Cluster before NGVS, but by using CFHT’s powerful camera over a huge 100-square-degree swath of the sky (an area larger than 500 full moons), researchers have now cataloged more than three times as many previously unseen galaxies. After all the data have been crunched, researchers will have a map of the Virgo Cluster in unprecedented detail.
Some people like to solve crossword puzzles; I like to solve physics problems,” says astronomer Laura Ferrarese.
[Photo courtesy of NRC-CNRC]
Ferrarese, whose research also focuses on the relation between supermassive black holes and their host galaxies and the expansion rate of the universe, is based in Victoria, Canada, and serves as principal research officer with Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics. The organization comprises several dozen astronomers and engineers and is part of the government-sponsored National Research Council of Canada. She is also immediate past-president of the Canadian Astronomical Society, a 400-member professional association that promotes educational opportunities for students and the advancement of astronomy in Canada.
The Italian-born Ferrarese says she was always drawn to science, particularly physics and math. “I liked the challenge of having a problem to solve, when you know there has to be an answer, but you don’t know what the answer is. Some people like to solve crossword puzzles; I like to solve physics problems,” she says.
She earned her PhD from Johns Hopkins in 1995, studying under Research Professor Holland Ford, and taught at Rutgers University before moving to Herzberg 10 years ago. She says her time at Hopkins gave her a big boost in the nascent stages of her career. “It was such a great place to be because of its connection with the telescope,” she says. “The department was then—and is now—such an important hub. There were always so many people visiting. As a student, I ended up knowing so many more people in the field than most people at that stage of their career.”
Ferrarese says that mining the NGVS data will keep her busy for several more years. However, she is already looking at the future, by participating in the design and planning for the next generation of telescopes, such as the Thirty Meter Telescope (that will be built on Mauna Kea, near the CFHT site) and the James Webb Space Telescope, generally seen as Hubble Space Telescope’s successor. As for what kind of science project to tackle next, Ferrarese says that one of the most fascinating results to come out of the NGVS to date was the discovery of an object belonging to the elusive “inner Oort cloud”—the second most distant object known in our solar system. “Arguably, we now know more about the Virgo Cluster than we do about our own solar system,” says Ferrarese. So her future research might bring her closer to home.
Scott Neese ’81 PhD learned early on the power humans have to affect the environment. All it took was a summer dip in Lake Ontario, which in the early 1960s was suffocating from toxic waste.
“Lake Ontario was kind of a dead lake at the time,” recalls Neese, a native of Rochester, N.Y. “Pollution was bad in the area where I lived. There were times you could swim and other times when you couldn’t; you’d get covered with tar or some other type of pollutant, and you’d have to go home and your parents would have to scrub you from top to bottom.” For a kid who grew up loving swimming and hiking and all things outdoors, the lake and its subsequent rehabilitation and restoration were a parable for the work that would eventually become Neese’s passion: industrial mercury remediation.
After earning his undergraduate degree at Washington and Lee University, Neese came to Johns Hopkins to pursue his PhD in chemistry under Craig Townsend, one of the giants in the field. Neese’s doctoral work included looking at some of the same environmental carcinogens that were polluting the Great Lakes, small entities known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH). Neese says PAHs, once ingested or inhaled, are especially noxious because the body’s natural detoxifying mechanisms activate the molecules “and make them more active carcinogens.”
Before launching his own environmental consulting company focusing on remediation of common laboratory hazards in 2002, Neese would spend nearly 20 years working in the chemical industry. He saw a sea change over the course of that generation, as older managers, “trained that environmental expenses are just lopping money off the bottom line and should be low on the list of priorities,” gave way to younger, more environmentally conscious staff. “Thankfully, the chemical industry has grown and matured, and decided they can be more cost-effective in their production, ensuring they’re not polluting because pollutants are more costly when you have to clean them up.”
Neese should know; his company, Charlottesville, Va.-based 3D EnviroLogics, helps institutions cut costs through remediation prior to and during facility renovations and demolitions. The 3Ds stand for “decommissioning, detection, and decontamination.” And while Neese’s small firm will take on most remediation tasks—lead paint, PCBs, you name it—its specialty is mercury, notably in old labs.
The only liquid metal, mercury can shatter into tiny beads below the threshold of vision—10 microns or less. “These beads make their way into the smallest nooks and crannies, under tile seams and cracks in concrete,” says Neese. When the beads are disturbed—such as during a demolition—their oxidized shells are crushed and release mercury vapor. Enough vapor can literally make you crazy: the term “Mad Hatter” referred to felters who worked with mercury and suffered neurological damage. And mercury that makes it into lakes and streams is just as toxic, transmogrifying into methyl mercury “that gets transferred up the food chain as it gets consumed, notably by salmon and steelhead trout,” says Neese.
Fortunately it’s that same mercury vapor that allows Neese’s team to track and remediate mercury. They use Russian technology that’s so sensitive it can sense 2 nanograms of mercury vapor per cubic meter. “If there’s a broken thermometer in an 80,000-square-foot area, we’ll find it,” says Neese.
3D EnviroLogics has found mercury in old National Institutes of Health labs (some of the mercury was 70 years old), in hydroelectric power plants (mercury was used to convert AC power to DC power and back again, for transfer along power grids), and it’s even discovered mercury on Hopkins’ Bayview Medical Center campus. When the Gerontology Research Center was scheduled for demolition, 3D EnviroLogics got a call. “We were hired so none of the mercury would end up there in the soil or in a landfill. Landfills typically aren’t permitted to handle it,” says Neese.
With clients including the NIH, FDA, National Cancer Institute, U.S. Navy, and Bonneville Power Administration (DOE), business is good these days for Neese.
Ultimately though, for this ardent fly fisherman, his satisfaction comes from making a major contribution toward cleaning up the environment and maintaining a healthy population of fish.
“Personally, I know how insidious mercury is in aquatic ecosystems, and because I love to fish, I feel like I’m perpetuating a recreational endeavor for my grandkids, and for everyone else who loves fishing mountain streams,” says Neese.
