Physics Faculty Garner Big Awards

Fall 2018

This has been a banner semester for the Krieger School’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, as several of its faculty members have received major grants and awards.

kamionkowskiMarc Kamionkowski, a professor who is developing theories to explain how the universe was formed, is one of six physicists selected to receive a 2014 Simons Foundation Investigator Award, which will provide up to $1 million to support his work.

Launched in 2012, the program provides support to outstanding scientists, enabling them to conduct long-term studies of fundamental questions. The awards are given to mathematicians, theoretical computer scientists, and theoretical physicists such as Kamionkowski.

menardAstrophysicist Brice Ménard, an assistant professor in the department, is the recipient of one of this year’s Packard Fellowships for Science and Engineering. The fellowships provide the nation’s most promising early-career scientists and engineers with funding and the freedom to explore new frontiers in their fields of study.

Ménard will use the fellowship to advance his work in statistical analyses of large astronomical data sets and the study of galaxy formation and cosmology. His work has led to the detection of gravitational magnification by dark matter around galaxies, the discovery of tiny grains of dust in the intergalactic space, and a better understanding of how light rays propagate throughout the universe.

menardCollin Broholm, the Gerhard H. Dieke Professor of Physics and Astronomy, is one of 19 scientists nationwide to be selected as Moore Experimental Investigators in Quantum Materials. Through grants to 11 universities, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation encourages outstanding physicists to pursue ambitious, high-risk research, including the development of new experimental techniques. This five-year, $34.2 million investigator program encourages discoveries in the physics of quantum materials that could eventually lead to new applications in electronics, computing, energy technology, and medical devices. Broholm will receive $1.8 million to further his research.

An experimental condensed matter physicist, Broholm is interested in anomalous forms of magnetism, superconductivity, and their interplay. Of particular interest are crystalline materials where quantum effects are enhanced on account of competing interactions (frustration) or low dimensionality. The main experimental tool is neutron scattering, and Broholm has a long-standing involvement in development of the corresponding instrumentation.

Jens Chluba, an associate research scientist in the department, has been named one of the 43 new Royal Society University Research Fellows. The University Research Fellowship is a competitive award that provides outstanding researchers with the opportunity to build an independent research career. The award recognizes Chluba’s central contributions to cosmology and in particular his studies of physical phenomena that can be probed with the cosmic microwave background. Chluba’s five-year fellowship at the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University will begin in January. He will investigate CMB spectral distortions as a new probe of early-universe physics.

“We are proud to have these accomplished scholars as our colleagues,” says Daniel Reich, chair of the physics and astronomy department. “These awards are a reflection of the many accomplishments they have made in their respective fields. Being recognized in this way also demonstrates the broad range of expertise that is so characteristic of our department.”

New Bloomberg Professors Taking on Global Challenges

Fall 2018

Patricia Janak, Stephen Morgan

Patricia Janak (l), Stephen Morgan

The second cohort of Bloomberg Distinguished Professors was announced this past summer, and two of the three will be part of the School of Arts and Sciences. The appointments are the result of a $350 million gift from Johns Hopkins alumnus and former New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

Sociologist Stephen Morgan, neuroscientist Patricia Janak, and organization theorist Kathleen Sutcliffe joined the Hopkins faculty July 1, bringing the total number of Bloomberg Distinguished Professors to six. Morgan and Janak both hold joint appointments in the School of Arts and Sciences. Each professor is part of two or more divisions at Hopkins, and they conduct interdisciplinary research aligned with the university’s signature initiatives.

Morgan is part of the Department of Sociology at the Krieger School and holds a joint appointment at the School of Education. His research focuses on education and inequality.

Morgan became hooked on these questions in 1991, when, as a junior at Harvard, he first learned of the now famous Coleman Report. Commissioned by the U.S. Office of Education in accordance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the report reached groundbreaking conclusions that helped set in motion the mass busing of students to achieve racial balance in public schools. The study was conducted by James Coleman, founder of the Johns Hopkins Department of Sociology (originally the Department of Social Relations) and teacher of Aage Sørensen, the Harvard professor who introduced Morgan to the report. “From that day on, I was pretty sure I wanted to be a professor,” says Morgan.

Today, Morgan studies predictors of student achievement, particularly how high schoolers’ beliefs about the future affect whether they attend and graduate from college. Before coming to Hopkins, Morgan was the Jan Rock Zubrow ’77 Professor in the Social Sciences at Cornell University, where he also served for nine years as director of the Center for the Study of Inequality.

Morgan is participating in the university’s Institute for the American City, which draws together faculty members and students from across the university to develop and test solutions for the most pressing urban problems.

Neuroscientist Patricia Janak studies the biological basis of behavior and associative learning, with a particular focus on addiction. She is a member of the Krieger School’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and of the School of Medicine’s Department of Neurology.

Janak came to Hopkins from the University of California, San Francisco, where she was a professor of neurology. She studies changes in both normal learning scenarios and pathological learning, such as drug addiction or post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s a perfect tie-in to her future work in Johns Hopkins’ Science of Learning Institute, an ambitious, cross-disciplinary effort to accelerate science-to-practice translation along the continuum of learning, from basic research in molecules and genes to the creation of effective public school policy.

Janak will be teaching an undergraduate class on learning and memory and graduate courses in psychology and neuroscience. She has plans to bring together faculty from Psychological and Brain Sciences and Neuroscience who are interested in learning and reward mechanisms, and she’s particularly excited about “the influx at Hopkins of top-notch younger scientists” in this field.

Building a Sense of Accessibility

Fall 2018

Writing Seminars major Kylie Sharkey ’16 explores the next big thing in academic and cultured circles: the digital humanities.

When Sylvester Stallone as Rocky ran up the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s East Terrace steps, he gave the world one of its iconic movie scenes. With his gray tracksuit and arms stretched over his head, it was clear that he had conquered something, become someone, and reached the unreachable. This moment of humble triumph took place on the elitist steps of the museum. Rocky did not belong among the art of Picasso and Eakins. But still he ran and took ownership of the golden beacon on the Parkway. As an intern this summer in the museum’s Development Department, I was able to watch crowds of people re-create Rocky’s run each day. But only a small segment of these runners would actually venture inside the institution.

The facades of Johns Hopkins and the Philadelphia Museum of Art appear wildly different at first glance. The museum’s yellow Minnesotan dolomite glows in the late afternoon sun. Its sculpture-adorned pediments and soaring columns radiate.  While Hopkins’ Federal-style architecture may be less overt, its red brick and white marble speak clearly to an intellectual and inherently elitist past. Despite appearances, both campuses are open to the public and are full of people committed to sharing knowledge and resources. Anyone can walk Hopkins’ expansive brick paths. Anyone can run up the iconic “Rocky” steps. However, it remains challenging to get people to interact with the treasures inside the institutions, be they items in the Sheridan Libraries and University Museums at Hopkins or the Philadelphia Museum’s expansive collections. But in our digital age, the perceived barriers of inaccessibility are beginning to be challenged.

One day when I was working at the museum last summer, an email popped up with the subject NEW ON THE WEB.  The email referred to Art 24/7, an ongoing effort to digitize the museum’s more than 227,000 works. Before the Internet, every stunning piece, from Van Gogh’s Sunflowers to the horse armor of Duke Ulrich of Württemberg, was resigned to live only within the museum’s walls or in glossy print. But with the opening of a digital realm, museum objects have been given new life. Cézanne can now be viewed alongside an open Facebook tab, and Duchamp can be pasted into a term paper. But this process hasn’t happened overnight. Each object had to be painstakingly photographed and its data transferred from archaic note cards to digital databases. Currently, despite years of hard work, the public can electronically search for just 80,591 pieces out of more than 200,000. This monumental task takes time and, more troublingly, money. But the institution is devoted to the cause. It has become clear that there is a home for art beyond the physicality of a gallery—and this digital home bypasses architectural features steeped in exclusivity.

Gabrielle Dean, my professor at Hopkins for a course I took called The Library and the Laboratory, was constantly urging our class to think of the library’s role and appearance in the future. With the emergence of digital reading tablets and expansive online databases, our musings would often take the library out of its physical space and into the digital world. Members of our class, including me, wrote a regular blog, which helped promote this forward-thinking trend. Our class’ work and ideas could be presented to the public without many of the barriers of access surrounding the actual library. While few people were curled up on their couches at home reading our thoughts about ancient manuscripts, the idea is that they could. The humanities are being digitized, and it is opening a new avenue of access. Luckily, and unexpectedly, I have found that both my academic and vocational worlds put me at the threshold of this emerging trend.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is taking a note from Rocky himself as it looks to triumph over its image as an inaccessible institution by giving its collections new life on the Web, where the public can view them most easily. Johns Hopkins is following suit as professors push for materials to be placed online and as research resources are increasingly digital rather than physical. The grand and often intimidating architecture of the past is being put into conversation with the digital architecture of our future. As this shift occurs one thing is clear—information is being housed in new ways. So please, do come inside, there is so much to show you.

Of Biology and Daylilies

Fall 2018

Graduate student Elliot Turkiew’s area of study is molecular and cell biology. So it’s no surprise that he really likes to talk about genetics. What you might not expect, however, is hearing him speak extensively about the Hemerocallis, or daylily.

You see, Turkiew is an avid grower of award-winning daylilies. What started as a hobby when he was about 10 years old has blossomed into a full-fledged passion, as he’s created and grown some 1,200 hybrid daylilies.

Though he’d love to grow the perfect “Hopkins Blue” daylily, he’s had to abandon that dream—at least for now. “I realized that trying to do that would take so, so long because blue isn’t even in the current color spectrum for daylilies,” he says wistfully.

A native of Long Island, New York, Turkiew became interested in daylilies when his mother began growing them in the backyard. The youngest of four (he’s sibling to autistic triplets), Turkiew found that working in the garden gave him some quiet, quality time to spend with his mom. And soon he began growing his own collections of daylilies.

About a year later, at age 11, Turkiew helped set up the exhibition at the annual Long Island Daylily Society Flower Show. He also entered some of his own daylilies and ended up winning first place in the youth division. In 2006, he won the Christine Erin Stamile Award from the American Hemerocallis Society, which automatically gave him a lifetime membership.

In addition to the 1,200 hybrids he has created, Turkiew has grown about 500 named varieties of other hybridizers’ plants. “Anyone can produce a new hybrid,” he says. “The idea is to produce an improved or particularly distinctive hybrid.”

In 2007, Turkiew began serving as a judge at nationally accredited flower shows, and in 2010, photos of flowers from his personal garden were published in The New Encyclopedia of Daylilies. In the fall of that year, he started at Johns Hopkins, initially majoring in biomedical engineering but switching to molecular and cellular biology at the Krieger School in his sophomore year. At that time, his pursuit of the perfect daylily had to take a back seat to his rigorous studies. But every summer, he returned to Long Island to work on his garden.

Even though school has limited the time he can spend growing daylilies, Turkiew’s expertise has not dimmed. He spends his summers continuing his hybridizing efforts and training and appointing exhibition judges for flower shows.

Turkiew earned his bachelor’s degree last May in the Krieger School’s BS to MS program and is on schedule to receive his master’s degree in May 2015.

He says his studies at Hopkins have informed his work with daylilies. “I’ve always been interested in complex genetics,” he says. “Some of my studies have given me a greater understanding of the hybridization process of daylilies.”

For all the time and effort aficionados like Turkiew put into creating and growing daylilies, their beauty is fleeting. It takes about two years for daylilies to go from seed to flower. And their peak bloom? That lasts just a few days.

Confront Climate Change Now

Fall 2018

Cindy Parker, MD, MPH, director of the Krieger School’s Global Environmental Change and Sustainability Program, and Raychel Santo, a 2013 graduate who majored in GECS, explore the impact of climate change on health.

Many people today see climate change as an overwhelming problem that future generations will have to face. This view makes it easy to justify delaying the personal and societal actions needed to prevent the worst effects of an unstable climate.

Perhaps there are smarter ways to approach this dilemma. Climate change is not a far-off phenomenon of sci-fi writers’ imaginations; we are already seeing its effects today. The way to get people to pay attention, and understand the potential for much more significant harm, may be to point out the effects through the lens of something important to all individuals: their health.

Climate change affects health most directly through extreme weather. While no weather events individually can be attributed to climate change, consensus among leading scientific organizations suggests that the phenomenon is largely responsible for the increased frequency and intensity of hot days and heat waves and for the number of heavy rainfall events.

Extreme weather events affect our most vulnerable populations—children, elders, the poor, and the chronically ill—whose bodies may not take heat stress as easily, may not have access to air conditioning and other important adaptive infrastructure, and may be less mobile and therefore unable to move out of hazardous situations. As climate change’s effects worsen, the range of impacts will increase to affect everyone, regardless of income.

Higher temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns will increase the habitats for disease-carrying mosquitoes and ticks, leading to increased global risk for illnesses including malaria, dengue fever, and Lyme disease. Warmer conditions and increased precipitation and run-off can increase the prevalence of food- and waterborne illnesses. As higher temperatures also worsen ground-level ozone air pollution, people with heart and lung diseases, such as asthma, will be at higher risk for health problems, and healthy individuals will have a greater risk of developing asthma.

Climate change will also affect our water and food supplies significantly. Extreme weather events such as California’s current unprecedented drought (which is threatening the livelihood of millions of residents as well as farmers who supply nearly half of U.S.-grown fruits, nuts, and vegetables) not only drive immediate drinking water shortages but also add increased vulnerability within our food production systems. Considering that nearly a third of the world’s land surface may be at risk of extreme drought by 2100, these implications are gravely concerning. Meanwhile, increased plant pests and disease, shifting planting zones, and ground-level ozone poisoning are further slated to decrease food production. These projections are alarming, especially given the United Nations’ most recent mid-range global population projection of 9.7 billion by 2050, an increase of 2.4 billion people. The population increase, combined with trends of increased demand for resource-intensive animal protein from developing nations like China, signals the very real potential for food and water shortages across the globe.

Displaced populations of individuals from coastal regions, island nations, and other impacted areas will also lead to increased stress on other water, food, and health services systems, at best, or violent conflict, at worst. Where these environmental refugees go, and how they are accepted and integrated into new countries and communities will be critical to avoiding or reducing conflict in the near future—and will undoubtedly impact public health.

We do not need—and cannot afford to wait for—technology to do what needs to be done. We already know what to do and how to do it. It will require drastically different (though not necessarily “worse” and in many ways “better”) lifestyles for those of us in developed countries. This entails flying and driving much less (and when we do, using the highest efficiency, lowest emitting technologies); eating more unprocessed, ecologically grown, and regional foods found lower on the food chain; creatively redistributing resources; avoiding and repurposing waste; and in general, buying less fossil-fuel-intensive materials, from petroleum-based plastic bottles to pesticide-ridden cotton clothing.

It will take more than a few informed individuals changing their lifestyles in this manner. We need widespread structural and societal changes to shift the way we carry out our daily activities. It will be difficult. Addressing the health angle of climate change’s impacts may help individuals and society understand how the changing climate is already affecting us, right now and right here in the United States. This strategy might also facilitate a more accurate vision of what is to come in an unstable, out-of-control climate. Making necessary changes now to stabilize the climate will ensure a happier, healthier future for us all.

Part-time Graduate Programs Expand

Fall 2018

The Krieger School’s Advanced Academic Programs (AAP) is offering three new part-time graduate degrees and/or certificates in the areas of science writing, intelligence, and government analytics.

“These new programs are reflective of the science, analytics, and excellence in writing for which Johns Hopkins is known,” says Kathleen Burke, associate dean for graduate and professional programs. “Their online and part-time formats provide more choice for students while maintaining the quality that is the hallmark of the university.”

The online/low-residency Science Writing program is a natural offshoot of AAP’s MA in Writing Program, where science writing had been taught as a concentration for 21 years. The program offers both a certificate and a degree track. Science Writing students learn to translate the complicated information and trends of science, medicine, and technology into meaningful, perceptive prose that serves a vital public purpose.

The Certificate in Intelligence is designed for students who are interested in intelligence, whether as national security professionals or as citizens and taxpayers. The certificate complements the current MA and certificate offerings in the Center for Advanced Governmental Studies. The program provides students with an understanding of the ways in which the United States practices intelligence; the purposes to which it puts intelligence; the limits upon intelligence—practical, legal, ethical and theoretical; and the important debates about the issue.

The Government Analytics Program prepares students to become leaders in the big data revolution. The program can be completed as a Master of Science degree or by students seeking a stand-alone credential in analytics, or by those who wish to supplement one of their other degree programs, such as the MA in Government, MA in Public Management, or MA in Global Security Studies. Students in both tracks will develop expertise in analytical methods, which are increasingly relied upon by government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and the private sector.

Clear Thinking About Brain Injuries

Fall 2018

Teaching Professor Linda Gorman teaches students about the implications of brain damage.

Teaching Professor Linda Gorman makes no apologies for being a fast talker. As her students know, the director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins just can’t help herself.

“I use PowerPoint in my classes; it forces me to go slower,” she says. “It’s just I get excited, and when I get excited that makes me talk even faster. I love teaching—it’s so much fun.”

In particular, Gorman gets excited discussing her upper-level undergraduate course Brain Injury and Recovery of Function, which she conceived and has taught since 2002. The course is designed to keep students on the cutting edge of the field, and thus relies heavily on the most current primary sources: medical, scientific, and psychiatric journals and papers.

“This is a field that is totally freeing because you don’t know everything, you can’t possibly know everything, but you have to be able to think and question,” Gorman says. “A lot of what we think we know about the nervous system is going to change. That’s why I can’t keep a textbook for more than two years. You have to be able to modify and not be tied to one theory.”

Early in the semester, the 15 students in the class took turns discussing their backgrounds and scientific interests (most are seniors majoring in neuroscience), before Gorman launched into a lecture on the history of the field. Throughout the fall, the course covers such topics as the cellular and molecular mechanisms of brain injury, immune and inflammatory responses, and the recovery of function.

“We talk generally because it doesn’t matter how the brain gets injured,” she says. “The brain has only so many different things it does with an injury, so we talk about those things.”

Gorman complements her lectures by having students break into small groups to learn how to research and reference medical literature and materials—on such injuries as cranial traumas, strokes, spinal cord damage, degenerative and neurological diseases, and tumors. “They get to read the experts in their fields, so that’s a good starting place,” she says. “They extrapolate and defend what they’re saying and learn to be concise and articulate. That’s what scientific writing is.”

They also write six “scientific reflections” and three summary papers, plus deliver 20-minute oral presentations throughout the semester.

“I wanted them to do presentations where they were reading the primary journal article and becoming the resident expert,” says Gorman. “It’s one thing to read it yourself and write papers, but they have to actually present it and talk to other students in a way they can understand. That’s a skill for whatever field they go into.”

The overall goal, says Gorman, is to get the physicians and scientists of tomorrow to think critically and be able to express their ideas. “I’m teaching them how to take information in the literature and come up with their own ideas, and articulate it in written and oral formats,” she says.

“I could talk forever and get them excited,” Gorman says. “But unless you take this information and think about it from your own perspective and relate it to somebody else, you’ll never get it. This kind of class forces them to use the information and think of how to help put together the story. Hopefully, they now have a way of thinking and questioning, to have ways to find the answers.”

Krieger School Awarded Department of Education Grant

Fall 2018

The Krieger School of Arts and Sciences has been awarded a $960,000 grant of Title VI funding from the U.S. Department of Education to establish a new Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship Initiative (FLAS).

The FLAS grant will be used to support undergraduate and graduate students who are studying modern foreign languages and international studies. The funding will also contribute to the recruitment of undergraduate students into the school’s international studies major. This is the first time a division of Johns Hopkins has received Title VI funding.

The new initiative will be jointly led by Pier Larson, professor in the Department of History and vice dean for humanities and social sciences, and Sydney Van Morgan, director of the Program in International Studies at Johns Hopkins.

“The FLAS grant is a testament to the Krieger School’s commitment to international education,” says Beverly Wendland, interim dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. “Our area studies and foreign language studies are among the best in the nation, and this funding affirms that excellence.”

The Krieger School offers courses in 13 modern foreign languages in a variety of majors, minors, and graduate degree programs. German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Hebrew are offered through the school’s Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures, while Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, and Russian are offered through the Center for Language Education.

“This is a really exciting development for Hopkins and for the International Studies Program,” says Van Morgan. “FLAS fellowships are a powerful tool for recruiting top students, attracting additional grant funding, building new area programs, and growing enrollment in less commonly taught languages.”

FLAS grants are awarded to institutions for a four-year period. Those institutions then conduct annual competitions to select eligible undergraduate and graduate students to receive fellowships in accordance with FLAS program eligibility requirements.

“This grant demonstrates faith in our momentum in international studies and will provide much needed new undergraduate scholarship and graduate fellowship funding to students,” says Larson. “It will also support the excellent teaching and advising work of our faculty in international studies.”

Information about how to apply for fellowships is on the website for the Program in International Studies.

Kelly Lampayan ’15: Starry-eyed

Fall 2018

The Research

Kelly Lampayan’s research attempts to answer the question of whether it is possible that host galaxies have star formation rates large enough to power observed radio emission. Lampayan, a double major in physics and astronomy and applied mathematics and statistics, is studying a large sample of galaxies that are known to host radio-quiet quasars, some of the most remote and powerful objects in our universe. By measuring the star formation rates, she can predict the amount of radio emission that can actually be attributed to star formation and compare these predictions to the observed emission.

In Her Own Words

“If you had asked me what a quasar was before I started this project, I probably wouldn’t have been able to tell you. I was pretty naive about how astrophysics research is done. The wonderful thing about research, however, is that you learn so much while doing it. A lot of work has gone into the research paper using our data, and it’s been surprising to see just how many hours of work are actually behind a single sentence.”

Adviser: Nadia Zakamska, Assistant Professor, Physics and Astronomy

Jenny "Em" Mitchell '15: Mormon Stories

Fall 2018

The Research

Psychology major Jenny Mitchell’s research looks closely at sexuality and gender issues in the Mormon Church. Over two summer sessions, Mitchell interviewed LGBT individuals who were also involved in Latter Day Saints (Mormon) culture in Provo, Utah, and in Singapore. She hopes to translate some of the stories she gleaned into a fictional screenplay.

In Her Own Words

“This research project has been one of my most eye-opening experiences while at Hopkins. Doing interviews instead of surveys has allowed me to get at some very intimate stories and really see the range of experiences that are possible for LGBT Mormons. Additionally, keeping in touch with my interviewees over a year later has allowed me to see the changes and consistency in their situations. I would say what I have learned the most through this research is that a label cannot delineate all the traits of any individual and definitely cannot give you more than a snapshot of that individual’s life context.”

Adviser: Roberto Busó-García, Faxon Fund Practicing Artist, Writing Seminars 

A Fond Farewell

Fall 2018

Four years ago, as a new dean of the Krieger School, I welcomed the freshmen and hence, in a very real way, I am a member of the class of 2014 now and forever. It has been a pleasure to watch them mature into scholars, athletes, researchers, and community volunteers. Their presence has enriched the university and the city of Baltimore. They are ready to pursue the many paths they have chosen. As it turns out, I will be graduating with them as I take my leave from the Krieger School and head to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where I will become the provost and senior vice chancellor of academic affairs this summer. I join my fellow classmates in feeling a bit wistful about what we are leaving behind.

In my time as dean, some remarkable changes have taken place that will have a lasting impact on the arts and sciences. Together with my vice deans, department chairs, the countless committees we rely on, President Daniels, Provost Lieberman, and our many colleagues, we have worked on reforms that have made the Krieger School a stronger institution: more committed to our remarkable undergraduates, mindful of the financial and academic needs of our exceptional doctoral students, and with a surer compass to guide the future as a consequence of several years’ worth of planning about the fields in our constellation.

Thanks to the support of hundreds of donors, we have seen the undergraduate community become more diverse as increased financial aid helps to ensure that we live up to our credo as a true meritocracy. All the indicators of success—from SAT scores to high school GPAs to the artistic portfolios presented in the admissions season—are rising, while the presence of underrepresented minorities has grown substantially. The best and the brightest are headed to Johns Hopkins, and we are able to welcome them to a much greater degree than we could afford in the past because of the generosity of parents, alumni, and friends whose endowed scholarships make it possible.

Once here, undergraduates are finding their faculty more accessible as the proportion of teaching time devoted to their intellectual growth has increased. This bucks a national trend and bespeaks an important commitment on the part of my colleagues. At the same time, our new sabbatical program ensures that the scholars who live here will be able to devote increasing attention to their research and publications.  It is their eminence that underwrites the high value of a Krieger School degree, and this investment in their visibility works to the good of everyone, student and faculty member alike.

We have been able to grow and renew the faculty, the true lifeblood of the institution, while retaining all that we value in our emeritus colleagues. The Academy at Hopkins, a new institute for advanced study for the retired faculty, now occupies the historic Greenhouse, the first building constructed on the Homewood campus. It is evolving into an entirely new concept in retirement, one built around research and continued participation in the intellectual life of the professoriate. In turn, this has enabled the Krieger School to hire new assistant professors and senior scholars. Indeed, the faculty has grown by about 16 percent in the past four years, and the newcomers bring with them all of the virtues of cross pollination that an academic community requires.

Having concluded that the arts should be more robustly represented in the Krieger School, we have expanded the Writing Seminars and the Film and Media Studies Program, and are poised now to collaborate with Peabody on the development of a major in music. By popular demand, we have created a minor in fine arts and are working on philanthropic support to create a chair in the name of our beloved John Astin to stabilize the Program in Theatre Arts and Studies. The Museums and Society Program is thriving, linking the Krieger School to some of the magnificent museums of Baltimore and Washington, D.C.

These efforts will unfold in large measure in an entirely new venue: Station North. Located about a mile south of the Homewood campus, Station North has been designated an arts neighborhood, and together with the Maryland Institute College of Art, the Maryland Film Festival, and Peabody, we are setting up shop in a unique community.

The historic Parkway Theatre will be its epicenter as it is restored to its former 1915 glory and readied to display films produced by the combined faculties and student bodies of these sister institutions. Across the street, an old art deco theater is being reconfigured to house classrooms, editing suites, and offices for the film faculty, the sound artists, and ultimately the computer programmers who will contribute their skills to the electronic gaming and sound track creation that will grow in that space. This “Silicon Valley of the Arts” will take shape over the next five years.

The opening of the Undergraduate Teaching Laboratories building, with its view of the sculpture gardens and light-filled labs, has created new energy in the life sciences. Dozens of faculty members have devoted their time and creativity to new ways to invigorate science instruction, from “active learning” classrooms in introductory physics, to the phage hunting class in biology, to the state-of-the-art simulation and modeling techniques in biophysics. I am particularly fond of the PILOT peer learning program, where undergraduates who have done exceptionally well in these difficult science courses turn their talents to nurturing their fellow undergraduates in small groups.

These are but some of the many changes that have taken place in the last four years. No doubt there will be much more to come under the leadership of my successor, whom President Daniels will be searching for in the months to come. I will look on from the distance of western Massachusetts as this outstanding school continues to move from strength to strength.

Sincerely,

Katherine Newman
James B. Knapp Dean

After Apartheid

Fall 2018

bookshelf-after-apartheid-2
“This whole process is exhausting, sometimes I just give up, and I go home,” says a 28-year-old South African woman named Thandiswa. She’s talking about the process of looking for a job—in a township where unemployment is running north of 50 percent. Thandiswa is one of seven principal characters featured in After Freedom: The Rise of the Post-Apartheid Generation in Democratic South Africa, the latest book by Katherine Newman, dean of the Krieger School. Co-authored with Ariane De Lannoy, lecturer at the University of Cape Town, the book is a penetrating and poignant exploration of race, prosperity, class, identity, and the shifting soil of hope, 20 years after the first free election and the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as the first black African president of Africa’s richest and most unequal country.

Newman has been conducting field research in South Africa over a five-year period, joining fellow sociologist De Lannoy and a team of researchers to weave a work as multilayered as the fabric of South Africa itself, enfolding their characters’ disparate histories, their intersecting lives, and their newly shared destiny. It is Newman’s 12th book, reflecting, as do many of her earlier works, her abiding interest in families and individuals caught at the intersection of economic opportunity, race, and social class.

Thandiswa is a Xhosa former cattle herder who, despite her new social equality, finds herself marooned in the sun-scorched outskirts of Cape Town, in a poverty-stricken township called Khayelitsha. There she lives in a house of “pale plaster, the color of milk” and is “mired in what seemed to be a paralyzing depression and without a job or any means of supporting her family,” the authors write.

“I’m free now to go wherever I want to and do anything that I want. I could live anywhere I want to. No one is going to say, ‘Hey, kaffir, you don’t belong here,’ ” says Thandiswa. “Yes, it’s up to me. It’s me that’s going to lift herself up.”

Yet just a few miles away, in a flat that “screams a kind of modernism” in a throbbing, multiracial seafront neighborhood, lives Amanda, “every inch the contemporary, upscale Black girl,” living a professional and social life that would have been unimaginable, and of course illegal, just two decades before.

In these women, in suddenly struggling young white Afrikaners, in striving refugees from the beggared autocracies of Central Africa, and in the aspiring people of mixed racial and national heritage formerly segregated as Coloureds, Newman and De Lannoy observe a generation whose lives already have encompassed “two of the most dramatic political experiments in the history of the modern world.”

Nothing in their families’ backstories prepared the seven principal characters—or South Africa itself—for this new landscape of excited expectations, liberated politics, inverted opportunities, murderous crime, endemic corruption, and what Newman calls “impossible poverty traps.”

“Most distant observers look at South Africa only through the racial lens,” Newman says during an interview in her office at the Homewood campus. “But there are huge differences within the racial groups, differences that have widened since the end of apartheid.” It is a difference that registers Thandiswa’s inertia and Amanda’s ascent.

South Africa in 2014, she says, is a land of “huge galloping inequalities—one of the most unequal countries on the planet. Trends that have emerged all over Western Europe and the U.S. slammed into South Africa just as apartheid ended. And the divide is widening.

“Still, houses have been constructed. Electricity has been spread. Something much closer to universal education has been achieved. A pension system has been created. A child-allowance system has been created. Affirmative-action programs have been put in place.

“And I do believe that the generation whose perspective we’ve tried to capture in After Freedom, despite their disappointments, do see one another as potential allies for a better future for South Africa. Despite the problems, it is a democracy.”