Big Data Expert Named Bloomberg Professor

Fall 2018

Alexander Szalay, a professor in the Krieger School’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, has been named a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor. The professorships are supported by a $350 million gift to the university by Johns Hopkins alumnus and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Each Bloomberg Distinguished Professor is affiliated with two or more JHU divisions, conducts multidisciplinary research, and teaches students across the university.

Szalay, the founding director of the Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science at Hopkins, says his interest in big data began when he became a key contributor to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Since then, he has collaborated with colleagues at JHU to build scientific databases “that change the way we do astronomy” and to democratize access to supercomputer simulations.

Szalay, who is also a professor in the Department of Computer Science in the Whiting School of Engineering, has already helped build a similar database for radiation oncology, and is now collaborating on designing one for high-throughput genomics. The efforts, Szalay believes, will help the university become “a major player” in the world of high-performance computing.

Science Postdocs Take to the Classroom

Fall 2018

Postdoc Derek Prosser teaching his newly created course Proteins, Genetics, and Human Diseases

Postdoc Derek Prosser teaching his newly created course Proteins, Genetics, and Human Diseases

Shevaun Lewis, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Cognitive Science, is pursuing a career as a research professor. She loves to teach but knew her skills as an instructor needed a little polishing.

Then she learned about a new program at the Krieger School in which science postdocs create their own courses and engage in a workshop where they can enhance their teaching abilities. Established in 2014, the Dean’s Postdoctoral Science Teaching Fellowships has two goals: to offer more small science courses to undergraduates, especially freshmen, and to help postdocs develop their own courses and teaching experience.

“The results have really been positive,” says Joel Schildbach, vice dean for undergraduate education and director of the program. “The undergraduates love the innovative courses, and the postdocs get the opportunity to hone their craft.”

Postdoctoral fellows in the program are required to enroll in a Summer Teaching Institute, sponsored by Johns Hopkins’ Center for Educational Resources. The institute is designed to develop university-level educators by improving classroom teaching and attracting diverse students to all majors.

Lewis’ course was called Born to Talk: Language in the Human Mind and introduced students to the scientific study of language through the lens of human language acquisition.

“The students seemed very interested in the topic,” says Lewis. “The training I got at the Summer Teaching Institute was extremely helpful. I was able to try out various strategies for promoting class engagement and active learning, rather than just relying on lectures.”

Postdoc Derek Prosser designed and taught Proteins, Genetics, and Human Diseases. He said the students’ enthusiasm was the best part for him.

“I designed the course as a combination of lecture and lab sessions, where the lectures focused on the genetics and molecular mechanisms of diseases. In the lab sessions, the students participated in a research project using baker’s yeast as a model for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis,” Prosser says. “The project was one that had never been done anywhere in the world before, and the students obtained new and exciting results that may be directly relevant to our understanding of human disease.”

Titles of other courses included How to Build an iPhone: Physics in Modern Life; and Powering Tomorrow: The Chemistry Behind Alternative Energy.

“Many of these courses are for freshmen, and it’s a great way for them to discover if they want to pursue further study in a particular field of science,” says Schildbach.

Is There Value in Violence?

Fall 2018

Benjamin Ginsberg, the David Bernstein Professor of Political Science and the director of JHU’s Center for Advanced Governmental Studies, explores the worth of violence. Ginsberg is the author of two recent books: The Value of Violence (2013) and The Worth of War (2014).

The national and international events of recent months remind us that violence is brutal and terrible. Yet, while we may shrink from violence, we should not shrink from attempting to analyze and understand it. A capacity for violence has always been an important facet of human nature. Humans—and perhaps their pre-human ancestors as well—have engaged in murder and mayhem, as individuals and in groups, for hundreds of thousands of years. At least since the advent of recorded history, violence and politics have been intimately related. States practice violence against internal and external foes. Political dissidents engage in violence against states. Competing political forces inflict violence upon one another.

Academic discussions of the relationship between violence and politics fall into three main schools. Some authors see violence as instrumentally related to politics. Philosopher Thomas Hobbes, for example, viewed violence as a rational means by which individuals sought to achieve such political goals as territory, safety, and glory. In a similar vein, Prussian military thinker Carl von Clausewitz famously referred to war as the continuation of politics by other means. A second group of authors views violence as typically resulting from political failures and miscalculations. The title of an influential paper on the origins of the American Civil War by historian James Randall, “The Blundering Generation,” exemplifies this idea. A third group, most recently exemplified by psychologist Steven Pinker, views violence as a form of pathological behavior that is perhaps diminishing in frequency with the onward march of civilization. Some proponents of this perspective have even declared that violence is essentially a public health problem.

Whatever their differences of emphasis, each of these perspectives assigns violence a subordinate role in political life—a secondary means of achieving political goals, a result of political miscalculations, and an expression of political pathology. Political philosopher Hannah Arendt once noted that there is an alternative view that assigns violence a superordinate role in politics. This perspective is implied by Mao Zedong’s well-known aphorism that political power “grows out of the barrel of a gun.” For Mao, violence is the driving force in the political arena, while more peaceful forms of political engagement serve to fill in the details or perhaps merely to offer post hoc justifications for the outcomes of violent struggles.

It is, to be sure, often averred that problems can never truly be solved by the use of force.  Violence, according to a popular bumper sticker, is not the answer. This adage certainly appeals to our moral sensibilities. But whether or not violence is the answer presumably depends upon the question being asked. For better or worse, it is violence that usually provides the most definitive answers to three of the major questions of political life: statehood, territoriality, and power. Violent struggle, in the form of war, revolution, civil war, terrorism, and the like, more than any other immediate factor, determines what states will exist and their relative power, what territories they will occupy, and which groups will and will not exercise power within them.

Generally speaking, political forces willing and able to employ violence to achieve their goals will best their less bellicose adversaries, overturning the results of elections, negating the actions of parliamentary bodies, and riding roughshod over peaceful expressions of political opinion. Indeed, the mere threat of violence is often enough to instill fear in and compel acquiescence on the part of those unwilling or unable to forcefully defend themselves. Violent groups can usually be defeated only by adversaries able to block their use of mayhem or to employ superior force against them. Those not willing to use violence seldom achieve their goals if pitted against an opposition that is not similarly constrained.

Much attention, of course, is given to the putative effectiveness of nonviolence as a political method. Nonviolent tactics are often said, for example, to have been instrumental in ending segregation in the U.S., Communist rule in Eastern Europe, and British rule in India.  Political leaders espousing a philosophy of nonviolence—Martin Luther King, Václav Havel, Mahatma Gandhi—played important roles in these cases. In actuality, though, far from being nonviolent, the protest tactics such as strikes, boycotts, and demonstrations employed by these leaders were designed to produce economic and social disruption and, in some instances, to provoke violent responses from their opponents. Violent attacks on apparently peaceful protesters would, it was hoped, elicit sympathy for the innocent victims of bloodshed and perhaps encourage powerful external forces to intervene on their behalf.

Violence, to be sure, is terrible, but it is also the great engine of political change. Many in the media and in the Hopkins community decried the violence that swept Baltimore in April 2015. Yet, after years of ineffectual complaints, violence unfortunately turned out to be the only tactic that could force city leaders to curb police misconduct in the streets of Baltimore.

Krieger School Welcomes New Dean

Fall 2018

The new dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences stands in a mud-smeared patch of lawn holding a wet tennis ball in her gloved hand. Whether the damp is from wet grass or dog drool is debatable, as the dean’s two dogs, Sookie and Lily, have been bounding across the freshman quad in pursuit of their toy. This is business as usual for Dean Beverly Wendland and her husband, Michael McCaffery, who directs the university’s Integrated Imaging Center, especially on Saturday mornings when they break from lab and office work to walk the canines that accompany them to campus every day. They’re often stopped with requests to pet the dogs. Today, a young boy in sweatpants approaches. “Do you want to say hello?” she asks the boy. “Do you want to give them a treat?”

Watching Wendland interact with Sookie and Lily, it’s clear how important her dogs are to her. But it’s the way she connects with the human community around her—be it faculty, students, staff, or someone with a desire to pet a dog—that makes an even bigger impression.

“I care deeply about people,” Wendland says. “And I want to make sure that everybody I work with feels valued and appreciated for their contributions. I also care deeply about making a difference. That’s one of the reasons I was attracted to the challenge of taking on this very important job. I want to leave the world a better place.”

That “very important job” is the James B. Knapp deanship of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, to which Wendland was appointed on February 12, 2015, after having served as interim dean since July 2014. President Ronald J. Daniels announced the appointment and said, “Beverly Wendland is the leader that the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences needs and deserves at this moment. Her deep passion and high aspirations for the school, her commitment to the institutional goals we all share, and her warm and collegial spirit will serve the Krieger School and our entire university enormously well in the years to come.”

Wendland joined the Hopkins faculty in 1998 as a member of the Department of Biology. She also holds a joint appointment in the Department of Biophysics. A recipient of funding from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, Wendland and her team study fundamental cellular processes using yeast cells as a simple model system.

Until being named permanent dean, Wendland was also principal investigator for a National Institute of General Medical Sciences training grant, which receives $1 million in annual funding for the Krieger School’s Cell, Molecular, Developmental Biology, and Biophysics graduate program—a program she previously co-directed.

“When I came to the biology department in 1998, there was a real opportunity for me to contribute and to grow as a result,” she reflects. “I was ready to embrace the challenge, and it’s been amazing.”

As chair of the biology department beginning in 2009, Wendland led its faculty through a comprehensive strategic planning process and significant turnover of faculty. She also facilitated important curricular changes, including working with the chemistry department to reimagine the organic chemistry/biochemistry course sequence for undergraduates. Wendland was an early champion of the Gateway Sciences Initiative, encouraging and supporting faculty who lead or participate in introductory science courses. She also helped plan the state-of-the-art Undergraduate Teaching Laboratories at Homewood, a building that is redefining the undergraduate research experience at Johns Hopkins.

Inspired by an earthquake

Wendland, 51, was born in Palo Alto’s Stanford Hospital, the only child of parents who divorced two years later. A self-described bookworm, she was usually the smartest kid in the class, and she recalls summers where she would read a book a day.

Although Wendland was close to both parents, she spent her early years with her mother, moving roughly every three years (including a yearlong stint on a 32-foot sailboat without plumbing in Santa Barbara harbor). Wendland credits her peripatetic childhood for making her “a resilient, adaptable sort of person.”

“I think I’m a trooper,” she says. “I don’t feel entitled to anything special. I just figure out how to make things work with what I have.”

It was the 1971 San Fernando earthquake, however, that set in motion Wendland’s interest in science. While her mother reacted to the earthquake by moving across the country to live near family in Pascagoula, Mississippi, Wendland, by contrast, became fascinated by the phenomenon. “My main reaction [to the earthquake] was to learn more about them,” she says. “I actually started out in college at San Diego State as a geophysics major. I’d really gotten interested in things like plate tectonics just from those early experiences.”

It was “a really amazing class in zoology” followed by a course in neurobiology that opened Wendland’s eyes to what she calls “the creative possibilities of science.” “The idea that you could look at a biological system and ask how or why does that work, and come up with these elegant experiments that demonstrate that this idea or question you had held some water was very appealing to me,” Wendland recalls.

A first-generation college graduate, she earned a BS in bioengineering from the University of California, San Diego, in 1986; received a PhD in neurosciences from Stanford in 1994; and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in cellular and molecular medicine at UCSD in 1998. Her mother, who returned to college as an adult and who passed away 20 years ago—just one year into Wendland’s postdoctoral studies—graduated from college a year after her daughter, she recalls proudly.

Outside the lab and classroom, Wendland enjoys crafts and cooking, and hosts her nearly 90-year-old father for dinner every Sunday since he moved to Baltimore two years ago.

She is also a collector of West Coast wine, an Orioles fan, and an avid walker who keeps track of her steps with a FitBit.

A vision for the future

As dean, Wendland has begun to strategize and formulate a vision for the School of Arts and Sciences, which starts with four goals that are interlinked and touch all corners of the Krieger community. The first includes enhancing and building on the school’s outstanding humanities programs. One step in this effort is the recently launched medicine, science, and humanities major. “The humanities equip our students with the skills of critical thinking, critical analysis, an ability to communicate clearly, and resiliency in terms of being able to grapple with tough problems and find answers to them,” says Wendland. “And I think those are the kinds of skills that are going to allow our students to thrive and excel, to become the leaders of the future.” On top of that, she adds, “the humanities just make you a better human, one who is better able to appreciate the world we live in and all of the diverse points of view in it.”

Wendland is also committed to diversity within the Krieger School and is in the process of reigniting the school’s Diversity Committee. “Increasing diversity among both faculty and the student body requires devoted, steady, conscious, unrelenting attention at a very local level as well as at higher levels,” Wendland explains. “This is crucial because it’s important that our university is an accurate reflection of the world’s diverse people and points of view.”

In addition, Wendland wants to build on the university’s mission of preparing students to be future leaders in the world through encouraging interdisciplinary research, innovation, and collaboration. Finally, the new dean hopes to strengthen engagement with the school’s volunteer leaders and alumni.

It is an ambitious agenda, but one that Wendland embraces with relish. “I believe in collaboration, innovative thinking, accountability, and, of course, hard work,” she says. “And Hopkins is a place where people with creative minds with a passion for learning have the opportunity to work together and do amazing things.”

New Major in Medicine, Science, and the Humanities

Fall 2018

Students who want to explore the intersections between medicine and the humanities will be interested in a new interdisciplinary major being offered at Johns Hopkins.

In January, the Krieger School announced the medicine, science, and humanities major for students who want to examine medical and scientific issues through the lens of humanities studies. The new major gives Hopkins undergraduate students the chance to pursue the natural sciences and the humanities, rather than having to choose one or the other.

Beverly Wendland, dean of the Krieger School, said the major was created in part to help close the polarizing gap between the sciences and the humanities.

“Given our academic strengths, Johns Hopkins is ideally suited to create a course of undergraduate concentration that focuses on the intersection of medicine, science, and the humanities,” says Wendland. “In the rapidly changing landscape of higher education in the 21st century, interdisciplinary approaches are needed to promote intellectual innovations and will forge productive connections between scientific and humanistic cultures.”

The new major will attract students who plan to pursue careers in the health professions, as well as those interested in issues of importance to science and medicine, and students who plan to pursue graduate work in a range of humanities and social science disciplines. The major does not fulfill all premedical requirements, but advisers will work with premed students regarding additional needed course work. The new major will also serve any student interested in a humanistic approach to science as the foundation of their liberal arts education.

“It is only recently that medicine, science, and the humanities have become separated and siloed,” says Charles Wiener, professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and interim director of the new major. “Professions such as medicine recognize that future physicians must be more humanistic with additional skills in critical analysis, communication, and teamwork. The new MCAT being introduced this year addresses these cultural changes. The expectations of incoming medical students are becoming much broader to include cross-cultural studies, ethics, philosophy, and a range of humanities studies—all with the goal to produce more well-rounded physicians.”

William Egginton, vice dean for graduate studies at the Krieger School and the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, spearheaded the effort to create the new major. He says students who graduate with the major will “demonstrate awareness of how the sciences and medicine are called upon to answer some of the same fundamental human problems that are addressed by the humanities.”

So far, more than a dozen incoming freshmen and several current freshmen have expressed interest in pursuing the major.

“I’m not at all surprised at the considerable interest being shown for the major,” says Wiener. “I look forward to meeting these students and sharing the details with them. Our new major is a reflection of the Krieger School’s mission to create new knowledge through research and scholarship. Like the humanities, science and medicine are essentially interpretive, creative endeavors, and the new major celebrates that integral connection.”

For more information visit krieger.jhu.edu/msh.

Finding the Payoff in Classroom Misbehavior

Fall 2018

Economics graduate student Victor Rondo is examining why women make less money than men, and his research has taken some unexpected turns.
I was nearing the end of my second year toward a PhD in economics and starting to think about independent research, when an opportunity came my way that piqued my interest and made me realize that you can go in one direction with research and end up in an entirely different place than you expected.

Nicholas Papageorge, an assistant professor in the department, approached me one day and started talking about an idea he and one of his colleagues had about how to break open the issue of gender inequality when it comes to salaries. What if, he asked, the inequality could be traced back—way back—to how kids behaved in the classroom? I was intrigued.

So far, I had spent much of my doctoral study looking at child-development literature. I was curious about why some children are smarter and behave in different ways than others. I was also fascinated that so many adult outcomes can be explained by skills and behaviors they learned in childhood. In fact, my own dissertation focuses on the role of parents in shaping their children’s skills and behaviors. The idea Dr. Papageorge was proposing seemed related to my own work, and I quickly told him to count me in.

In our research, we proposed that gender differences in classroom misbehaviors during childhood could explain the well-known but puzzling gaps in educational attainment and late-life earnings between men and women. Today, about 60 percent of college students are women, and women earn about one-third more undergraduate degrees than men, yet women are paid on average only 77 percent of what men are paid.

We knew that differences in what is called cognitive ability—such as math and reading test scores—could not explain the distinct gaps. If women had higher cognitive ability, they would perform better in school and in the labor market and likely enjoy higher earnings. Some researchers say gender differences in traits other than cognitive ability, such as behavioral ones, could explain the educational gap. But their research did not address the traits we thought were important, and they don’t explain the earnings gap. Could the gaps be traced back to early classroom days?

Very little information exists that links classroom behavior of children to earnings in adulthood. One exception, though, is a British study that followed a large number of children born in Britain in 1958 through adulthood. This seemed like a good place to start, as the study asked each student’s teacher questions about their behavior in school; questions that had not been asked in other surveys. And the study gave us recent information about their earnings as adults.

We found that our initial idea was both right and wrong. We did find that boys are relatively more likely to misbehave in the classroom than girls. We also confirmed, as expected, that misbehaving children had a harder time achieving higher levels of schooling. What was surprising, though, is that misbehaving children were receiving higher earnings than their well-behaved counterparts. This went against all we had seen in previous literature about classroom misbehavior. Contrary to our initial hypothesis, however, the misbehavior could not explain the gender earnings gap, as we saw that it was associated with a higher increase in earnings for women than for men.

Even though our results did not support our original hypothesis, they suggest that the educational system penalizes certain behaviors that are actually valued in the labor market. Now we had a whole new avenue of research to explore. We used these results to write a paper that looked at the mismatch that exists between the educational system and the labor market. We showed that policies aimed at suppressing misbehavior in school can actually hurt children in the long run. And supportive, student-teacher interventions aimed at reducing misbehavior can benefit children in school and later on in the labor market.

I am now working on a paper that will complement the British study; it explores how childhood misbehaviors are linked to adult outcomes in the United States. The results are still preliminary but seem to show a link between classroom misbehavior, the criminal system, and adult earnings. Also, since race and socioeconomic status are linked to criminal outcomes, the connection between childhood misbehavior and adult earnings depends on one’s race and socioeconomic group. The main finding so far is that classroom misbehavior hurts African-American children more than whites and Latinos, leading to greater risk of school suspension and incarceration as they become young adults.

I can’t tell you what this research will uncover next, but hopefully one day it could play a role in school or policy reform. In the meantime, I’ve learned one of the basic premises of research: be ready for the unexpected.

Drug Restores Brain Function and Memory in Early Alzheimer’s Disease

Fall 2018

Michela Gallagher

Michela Gallagher

A novel therapeutic approach for an existing drug reverses a condition in elderly patients who are at high risk for dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease, researchers at Johns Hopkins University found.

The drug, commonly used to treat epilepsy, calms hyperactivity in the brain of patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), a clinically recognized condition in which memory impairment is greater than expected for a person’s age and which greatly increases risk for Alzheimer’s dementia, according to the study published in March in Neurolmage: Clinical. 

The findings validate the Johns Hopkins team’s initial conclusions, published three years ago in the journal Neuron. They also closely match the results in animal studies performed by the team and scientists elsewhere. Lead investigator Michela Gallagher, the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience in the School of Arts and Sciences, hopes the therapy will be tested in a large-scale, longer-term clinical trial.

Hippocampal overactivity is well-documented in patients with aMCI, and its occurrence predicts further cognitive decline and progression to Alzheimer’s dementia, Gallagher said.

“What we’ve shown is that very low doses of the atypical antiepileptic levetiracetam reduce this overactivity,” Gallagher said. “At the same time, it improves memory performance on a task that depends on the hippocampus.”

The team studied 84 subjects—17 of them were normal healthy aged participants, and the rest had the symptoms of pre-dementia memory loss defined as aMCI. Everyone was over 55 years old, with an average age of about 70.

The subjects were given varying doses of the drug and also a placebo in a double-blind randomized trial. Researchers found low doses both improved memory performance and normalized the overactivity detected by functional magnetic resonance imaging that measures brain activity during a memory task. The ideal dosing found in this clinical study matched earlier preclinical studies in animal models.

“What we want to discover now is whether treatment over a longer time will prevent further cognitive decline and delay or stop progression to Alzheimer’s dementia,” Gallagher said.

Other team members from Johns Hopkins included Arnold Bakker, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences; Marilyn S. Albert, director of the Division of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Neurology; Gregory Krauss, professor of neurology; and Caroline L. Speck, the clinical study coordinator.

Gallagher is the founder and a member of the scientific board of AgeneBio, a biotechnology company focused on developing treatments for diseases that affect brain function. The company is headquartered in Baltimore.

Gallagher owns AgeneBio stock, which is subject to certain restrictions under Johns Hopkins policy. She is entitled to shares of any royalties received by the university on sales of products related to her inventorship of intellectual property. The terms of these arrangements are managed by the university in accordance with its conflict-of-interest policies.

From the Dean's Desk: Giving Back

Fall 2018

In the few months that I have had the privilege of serving as the Krieger School’s interim dean, I have realized that, in addition to being a community of dedicated and hardworking scholars who maximize our scholarship through helping each other, members of the Johns Hopkins family are similarly generous with their time outside the university, and they give back in extraordinary ways.

I witnessed this firsthand in October, when I participated in the sixth annual President’s Day of Service. Started by JHU’s President Ronald J. Daniels, the event attracts more than 1,000 students, professors, staff members, and alumni who spend the day making a lasting impact within the community (and even nationwide, as alumni groups elsewhere are also joining in!). The volunteers hit the streets of Baltimore to engage in projects such as cleaning up city parks, giving a fresh coat of paint to some area public schools, serving food at a soup kitchen, planting trees in a barren neighborhood, and loading up shelves at a food bank. I worked at Robert Coleman Elementary School in a collaborative effort among their students; JHU; an organization called Thread, which fosters the academic advancement of at-risk high school students; and students from Frederick Douglass High School. We could choose from several projects—my group cleared out and organized the science storage closet, which was full of all kinds of stuff! Some fourth graders were part of our team, and when heavy boxes came down the line, JHU freshman Allie coached two of them to share the load. Sharing the load is what we all did, and it made the job that much easier, and fun too. I made some new friends, and now look forward to future visits to Robert Coleman.

Of course, it’s not a complete surprise to me that our students are so active within the Baltimore community. As a professor in the Department of Biology, I regularly advise students, and they often tell me stories of their volunteer activities in health clinics, as tutors, and as coaches, to name only a few. Another example I recently learned about from representatives of the university’s Environment, Energy, Sustainability, and Health Institute is a different kind of service: Students and faculty use systems modeling to help several Baltimore neighborhoods identify the best strategies for tackling the city’s trash problem.

So clearly, volunteerism at Hopkins doesn’t just happen once a year on the President’s Day of Service. The “giving back” sensibility at Hopkins is broad and seems to be happening 24 hours a day, year-round, and in countless venues. Take the Center for Social Concern, as yet another example. It is home to more than 60 community service groups, including the JHU Tutorial Project, which—for more than 50 years—has been partnering our undergraduates with students from Baltimore City elementary schools. The Center for Social Concern also manages the popular Community Impact Internships Program—competitive, paid summer internships that pair Hopkins undergraduate students with nonprofit organizations and government agencies to work on key projects. It’s a great way for students to learn about the inner workings of community and policy organizations.

The innovative Community Impact Internships Program was made possible by a $1.25 million gift from an anonymous donor. Clearly, this donor is a person who understands that reaching out to help others is a learning experience that is just as important as the ones taking place in the classroom. What a difference that one gift is making in so many lives.

I want to take a moment to thank everyone who donates to the Krieger School, which is another important form of giving back. From new state-of-the-art laboratories to study-abroad opportunities to named professorships for our expert faculty—our donors make so much possible for us. They understand and embrace our mission to create new knowledge. They realize that giving back means they are helping prepare the next generation of leaders. They know that by supporting the Krieger School, they are cementing our role as the standard-bearers in fields that range from philosophy to physics.

Johns Hopkins is part of a larger community—the city of Baltimore. And whether we are residents here for four years as undergraduates or 40 years as seasoned faculty members, it is our responsibility to get involved and make a difference. To that end, Johns Hopkins is part of a larger partnership called the Homewood Community Partners Initiative, which comprises 10 adjacent neighborhoods and one commercial district. The partnership works on creating effective strategies in five key areas: quality of life, blight elimination, education, commercial and retail development, and local hiring and purchasing. Addressing these important issues will have a strong impact by truly improving the lives of so many.

I’m pleased that members of the Hopkins community are exploring the myriad ways of giving back. It’s a testament to our wide-ranging dedication and commitment to helping others. Johns Hopkins is so well-known for its intellectual prowess; it’s time that we also become known for our compassion and civic-mindedness.

Sincerely,

Beverly Wendland
Interim Dean

New Faculty

Fall 2018

The Krieger School of Arts and Sciences welcomed new faculty members in 2014, with expertise in areas ranging from macroeconomics to Mars. Here is a brief introduction to them:

Biology

taylor

James Taylor , Ralph S. O’Connor Associate Professor, received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and most recently taught at Emory University. Research: regulation of transcription, chromatin structure, computational genomics, and bioinformatics.

 

Earth and Planetary Sciences

horst

Sarah Hörst, an assistant professor, received her PhD from the University of Arizona and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Colorado Boulder. Research: atmospheric chemistry of Titan, complex organics elsewhere in the solar system.

lewis

Kevin Lewis, an assistant professor, received his PhD from the California Institute of Technology and was most recently a research scholar at Princeton University. Research: planetary geophysics, the nature of sedimentary rocks on Mars, large-scale properties of planetary lithospheres.

 

Economics

chen

Ying Chen, an assistant professor, received her PhD from Yale University and most recently taught at the University of Arizona. Research: game theory, information economics, political economy, strategic communication and dynamic bargaining.

korinek

Anton Korinek, an assistant professor, received his PhD from Columbia University and most recently taught at the University of Maryland. Research: international finance and macroeconomics, capital controls, and macro-prudential regulation as policy tools to reduce risk of future financial crises.

takahashi

Yuya Takahashi, an assistant professor, received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin – Madison and most recently taught at the University of Mannheim. Research: empirical industrial organization, estimation of dynamic games, models of industry dynamics, methods of estimating treatment effects.

 

English

jackson

Jeanne-Marie Jackson, an assistant professor, received her PhD in comparative literature from Yale University and taught mostly recently at Connecticut College. Research: theory of the novel, hermeneutics, sub-Saharan African literature, Russian literature, post-colonial regionalisms.

achinstein

Sharon Achinstein, Sir William Osler Professor, received her PhD from Princeton University and taught most recently at the University of Oxford. Research: literature and political communication in the early modern period, the history of marriage, Milton’s writings on divorce, secularism, and early modernity

 

German and Romance Languages and Literatures

refini

Eugenio Refini, an assistant professor, received his PhD from the Sucola Normale Superiore di Pisa and was most recently a fellow at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. Research: medieval and early modern literary culture in Italy and France, art history, gender, visual studies, theater studies, rhetoric.

 

History of Art

lakey

Christopher Lakey, an assistant professor, received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and most recently was a Mellon Research Fellow at the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto and taught at Reed College. Research: medieval art; connections between cosmological manuscripts, lapidaries, mineralia, artistic manuals with medieval theories of matter.

 

History

furstenberg

François Furstenberg, an associate professor, received his PhD from Johns Hopkins and taught most recently at the Université de Montréal. Research: 18th- and 19th- century United States history, U.S. history from an international perspective, the early American West, political culture and intellectual history.

 

Physics and Astronomy

turner

Ari Turner, an assistant professor, received his PhD from Harvard University, and most recently taught at the University of Amsterdam. Research: superfluidity and magnetism in ultracold atoms, topological phases in solids, applying entanglement to find ground state properties of quantum systems.

 

Mathematics

dobson

Benjamin Dodson, an assistant professor, received his PhD from the University of North Carolina and was most recently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Research: partial differential equations, harmonic analysis.

 

Psychological and Brain Sciences

moss

Cynthia Moss, a professor, received her PhD from Brown University and taught most recently at the University of Maryland. Research: auditory information processing, spatial perception, attention and memory, adaptive behavior, sensorimotor integration, somatosensory signaling for flight control, acoustic communication, biological sonar.

 

Sociology

burdick-will

Julia Burdick-Will, an assistant professor, received her PhD from the University of Chicago and most recently conducted postdoctoral research at Brown University. Research: how neighborhood and social contexts shape educational inequity, demographic changes, high school attendance, school choice.

calder

Ryan Calder, an assistant professor, received his PhD this year from the University of California, Berkely. Research: financial markets, economic sociology, Islam, Middle East and North Africa, Muslim Southeast Asia, the Arab Spring, Islamic law and society, political sociology.

greif

Meredith Greif, an assistant professor, received her PhD from Pennsylvania State University and most recently taught at Georgia State University. Research: urban sociology, race and ethnicity, health and well-being, qualitative measures.

 

Writing Seminars

malech

Dora Malech, an assistant professor, received her MFA in poetry in 2005 from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has taught at Victoria University in New Zealand, Saint Mary’s College of California, and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Editor's Note

Fall 2018

Questioning the status quo is not an easy thing to do. Sometimes you end up rocking the boat a little too much. Sometimes people are resistant to looking at things in new ways. And let’s face it, the status quo can be a safe and comfortable place to rest. Unless you’re a Johns Hopkins researcher, that is. By their very nature, the scientists, professors, and researchers in the Krieger School are not afraid to push the envelope. They are bored with the status quo. Rather, they prefer to press on past the comfortable to discover new realities, new truths, and new knowledge.

This issue of Arts & Sciences magazine is a great example of the fruits that can be had by refusing to be satisfied with the way things are. Take our cover story—some of our sociologists and economists have been in the news recently for a number of interesting discoveries about families. Their research is showing that many common beliefs about how people live are simply not true. The old adage that people can “pick themselves up by their bootstraps” turns out to be virtually impossible for some because of reasons beyond their control. Check out the other popular “truisms” our scientists are bringing into question.

Meanwhile, in the basement of Ames Hall, Professor Cindy Moss is challenging some long-held beliefs about bats through her research on the nocturnal creatures. Did you know, for example, that “blind as a bat” couldn’t be further from the truth? More importantly, her work holds promising applications for people without sight and also for aircraft efficiency.

And as always, you will learn in this issue how some of our students are also pushing beyond the status quo, to conduct research in such far-flung places as Peru and Italy, to explore the challenges faced by female gubernatorial candidates, and to figure out if host galaxies have star formation rates large enough to power observed radio emission. That’s just a sampling.

Questioning the status quo. Pushing past the norm. Stretching the boundaries. Whatever you want to call it—it’s what Johns Hopkins researchers, students, and alumni crave. And yes, there are invariably stumbles along the way, but clearly it is still the path to new knowledge.

Kate Pipkin
Editor

President's Day of Service

Fall 2018

President Ron Daniels and his wife, Joanne Rosen, help spruce up the 29th Street Community Center

Paintbrush in hand, President Ron Daniels and his wife, Joanne Rosen, help spruce up the 29th Street Community Center.

On October 11, 2014, more than 1,000 members of the Johns Hopkins community, including students, faculty, staff, and alumni, participated in the sixth annual President’s Day of Service. Volunteers assisted dozens of Baltimore nonprofit organizations, like the Charles North Co-Op Garden, above, where JHU students weeded and cleared vacant space for a community garden.

 

 

Giving Back

Fall 2018

In the few months that I have had the privilege of serving as the Krieger School’s interim dean, I have realized that, in addition to being a community of dedicated and hardworking scholars who maximize our scholarship through helping each other, members of the Johns Hopkins family are similarly generous with their time outside the university, and they give back in extraordinary ways.

I witnessed this firsthand in October, when I participated in the sixth annual President’s Day of Service. Started by JHU’s President Ronald J. Daniels, the event attracts more than 1,000 students, professors, staff members, and alumni who spend the day making a lasting impact within the community (and even nationwide, as alumni groups elsewhere are also joining in!). The volunteers hit the streets of Baltimore to engage in projects such as cleaning up city parks, giving a fresh coat of paint to some area public schools, serving food at a soup kitchen, planting trees in a barren neighborhood, and loading up shelves at a food bank. I worked at Robert Coleman Elementary School in a collaborative effort among their students; JHU; an organization called Thread, which fosters the academic advancement of at-risk high school students; and students from Frederick Douglass High School. We could choose from several projects—my group cleared out and organized the science storage closet, which was full of all kinds of stuff! Some fourth graders were part of our team, and when heavy boxes came down the line, JHU freshman Allie coached two of them to share the load. Sharing the load is what we all did, and it made the job that much easier, and fun too. I made some new friends, and now look forward to future visits to Robert Coleman.

Of course, it’s not a complete surprise to me that our students are so active within the Baltimore community. As a professor in the Department of Biology, I regularly advise students, and they often tell me stories of their volunteer activities in health clinics, as tutors, and as coaches, to name only a few. Another example I recently learned about from representatives of the university’s Environment, Energy, Sustainability, and Health Institute is a different kind of service: Students and faculty use systems modeling to help several Baltimore neighborhoods identify the best strategies for tackling the city’s trash problem.

So clearly, volunteerism at Hopkins doesn’t just happen once a year on the President’s Day of Service. The “giving back” sensibility at Hopkins is broad and seems to be happening 24 hours a day, year-round, and in countless venues. Take the Center for Social Concern, as yet another example. It is home to more than 60 community service groups, including the JHU Tutorial Project, which—for more than 50 years—has been partnering our undergraduates with students from Baltimore City elementary schools. The Center for Social Concern also manages the popular Community Impact Internships Program—competitive, paid summer internships that pair Hopkins undergraduate students with nonprofit organizations and government agencies to work on key projects. It’s a great way for students to learn about the inner workings of community and policy organizations.

The innovative Community Impact Internships Program was made possible by a $1.25 million gift from an anonymous donor. Clearly, this donor is a person who understands that reaching out to help others is a learning experience that is just as important as the ones taking place in the classroom. What a difference that one gift is making in so many lives.

I want to take a moment to thank everyone who donates to the Krieger School, which is another important form of giving back. From new state-of-the-art laboratories to study-abroad opportunities to named professorships for our expert faculty—our donors make so much possible for us. They understand and embrace our mission to create new knowledge. They realize that giving back means they are helping prepare the next generation of leaders. They know that by supporting the Krieger School, they are cementing our role as the standard-bearers in fields that range from philosophy to physics.

Johns Hopkins is part of a larger community—the city of Baltimore. And whether we are residents here for four years as undergraduates or 40 years as seasoned faculty members, it is our responsibility to get involved and make a difference. To that end, Johns Hopkins is part of a larger partnership called the Homewood Community Partners Initiative, which comprises 10 adjacent neighborhoods and one commercial district. The partnership works on creating effective strategies in five key areas: quality of life, blight elimination, education, commercial and retail development, and local hiring and purchasing. Addressing these important issues will have a strong impact by truly improving the lives of so many.

I’m pleased that members of the Hopkins community are exploring the myriad ways of giving back. It’s a testament to our wide-ranging dedication and commitment to helping others. Johns Hopkins is so well-known for its intellectual prowess; it’s time that we also become known for our compassion and civic-mindedness.

Sincerely,

Beverly Wendland
Interim Dean