Not much rattles Joanne Silberner ’77. An award-winning veteran journalist and public radio reporter, Silberner has tackled the toughest stories, covering global health issues that have taken her from Cambodia to Haiti.  Yet, even she had to take a deep breath when she walked into a certain new assignment.

“Yes, I was scared walking in the first day of my class,” she recalls. “There are 18 kids looking at you for wisdom, and you find yourself explaining what you have done for the last 30 years. A lot of what I’ve done over my career has been instinctive, so trying to teach that is a real challenge.”

That was in 2011, a few months after she relocated to Seattle, where her husband had accepted an academic post. In making the move, Silberner left behind an 18-year job at National Public Radio, covering everything “from the Food and Drug Administration to the chocolate industry in Brazil.”

Resourcefulness, however, seems to be hardwired into Silberner’s DNA. She soon re-launched her career as artist-in-residence in the University of Washington’s Department of Communication, teaching classes in global health reporting and narrative journalism. At the same time, she began actively freelancing for NPR and The World program on Public Radio International (PRI), as well as other public radio outlets, websites, and print publications. As she puts it, “While I say I currently teach half time and write half time, it’s more like 75 percent and 75 percent!”

Oddly enough, it was an early decision not to be a writer that led Silberner to her current career. Because of a discouraging experience with a high school English teacher, she vowed to pursue the sciences in college and “have nothing to do with writing or literature ever!” However, as a biology major at Johns Hopkins, she took a class in science writing during a semester away at the University of California. To her surprise, her professor was greatly encouraging about her work.

Back at Hopkins, she remembers, “You could find someone doing interesting work at Homewood or at the hospital, and talk yourself into a temporary place in his or her lab—kind of like doing a story. The university really gave me the tools to go out, ask questions, and appreciate the answers.”  By the time Silberner graduated from Hopkins, medical journalism was her chosen path.

After earning a graduate degree in journalism from Columbia University, Silberner landed her first full-time job at Science News in 1982, followed by a stint at U.S. News & World Report, and ultimately, her position as a health policy correspondent at NPR, focusing on mental health, governmental health legislation, and international health.

But her eventual move to Seattle and return to freelancing proved to be a turning point in Silberner’s career. Through the support of PRI and a travel grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting in 2012, she journeyed to India, Uganda, and Haiti to produce Cancer in the Developing World: The Economics of a Disease. Her five-part radio series brought to light the terrible toll cancer is taking in poor countries, where more succumb to this disease than from HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria combined.

“The sole reason I did this series? It was a big problem no one was talking to the public about—and a lot of it is preventable,” she says. “For example, almost 20 percent of cancers worldwide are caused by viruses, which at least theoretically could be stopped by a vaccine. All of these problems are easy to tackle if you have the interest.”

For this groundbreaking reportage, Silberner received not one but three awards last year, sharing top honors of the European School of Oncology’s (ESO) 2013 Best Cancer Reporter Award; the 2013 Communication Award from the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine; and the 2013 Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting. In particular, the Cohn Prize judges applauded Silberner for “consistently breaking new ground in a heavily covered beat, and recognizing new angles in important stories rather than offering stories that everyone else covers.” For Silberner, “it was very validating. All of a sudden, I won the trifecta!”

As she forges ahead with her teaching duties and a new set of assignments, which includes a new series on global health and private industry, Silberner acknowledges she is drawn to what she calls “neglected stories.”

“Amy Goodman, host of the Democracy Now radio program, once said, ‘Go to where the silence is and say something.’ That’s to me what journalism is all about. That’s what I’m trying to do now with my global health reporting.  I look to where the silence is—and then I go! The best I can do is to let other people know what is happening.”

 

When Rany Jazayerli ’95 was just 6 years old, he asked his dad for a copy of The Baseball Encyclopedia, a 2,500-page tome stuffed full of statistics. He devoured it.

As Jazayerli’s childhood unfolded—he grew up in both Saudi Arabia and Wichita, Kansas—he attended only one major league game, when he saw his beloved and beleaguered Kansas City Royals play at Royals Stadium.

That quickly changed when he got to Johns Hopkins. Beginning in September 1991, Jazayerli estimates he attended at least half a dozen Orioles games at Memorial Stadium before the regular season ended on Sunday, October 6. “It was fantastic,” he says. “I was a man dying of thirst, and a fire hydrant opened on me.”

Once the baseball season ended, the biology major became a regular in the computer lab, where he connected and argued with other sports fans on Internet bulletin boards. He also began playing Strat-o-matic, an early form of fantasy baseball that Jazayerli describes as a “very nerdy, very geeky hobby that kept me out of trouble.”

Plenty of baseball-obsessed students have studied at Hopkins over the years, but few are able to make baseball an integral part of their professional lives. Jazayerli is the exception. In 1996, he became one of the founding writers of the Baseball Prospectus, the compilation of baseball articles and statistics that has become the fantasy baseball player’s go-to reference. Since then, he has regularly contributed baseball analysis and opinion to ESPN.com and Grantland; created his own blog, Rany on the Royals; and continued to write for the print and online Baseball Prospectus.

And, oh yes, he also manages his own dermatology practice in suburban Chicago.

“I’m kind of an accidental writer,” Jazayerli admits. “I started writing about baseball because I was frustrated with the way the Royals were run, and pretty soon I’m writing for a national audience. It’s not something that I planned to do.” Given the demands of his medical career and his growing family (he has four children under the age of 12), most of Jazayerli’s writing occurs between 9 p.m. and 2 a.m., long after the children have been tucked in.

Jazayerli was still in college when an analysis he wrote, of minor league pitching prospects, caught the attention of Gary Huckabay, another bulletin board poster with an idea for a book on baseball statistics. The first Baseball Prospectus, printed without a formal publisher on white stock paper, was released in 1996, while Jazayerli was in medical school. The annual publication is now in its 19th edition.

The first Baseball Prospectus coincided with the baseball world’s growing interest in sabermetrics, the mathematical and statistical analysis of baseball espoused by writer Bill James and practiced perhaps most famously by Oakland Athletics manager Billy Beane, the subject of Michael Lewis’ book Moneyball (which was also made into a 2011 film).

This heightened attention to numbers began to influence the ways players were recruited and managed. Jazayerli contributed the concept of Pitcher Abuse Points, which posited that if pitchers threw more than 100 pitches per game, their rate of injury would greatly increase. In 1998, pitchers routinely threw up to 130 or 140 pitches per game, often blowing out arms and requiring surgery. Today, all across Major League Baseball, few managers allow starting pitchers to throw more than 110 pitches. Jazayerli takes no credit for the new limits on pitch counts. But he does concede that his statistic might have added to the conversation baseball management was having around pitcher injury. “The reality of the game is that 30 major league teams have decided collectively yes, limiting pitch count is important.”

“The greatest success of that statistic is that it has basically rendered itself obsolete,” he adds.

Some baseball fans still critique sabermetrics as reducing the game to numerical odds, but Jazayerli argues that statistics can add a deeper dimension to baseball. The numbers are what drew him to the game in the first place, he says. But he’s also moved by the history and inclusiveness of baseball.

“Baseball has long appealed to immigrant kids, and as the son of immigrant parents, being able to attach myself at a young age to the heart of Americana was important,” says Jazayerli. That appeal deepened at Hopkins, he says, where he had two distinct groups of friends: those who were similarly baseball obsessed and those who shared his Muslim faith. “I realized that at Hopkins I could be passionate about the most American of pastimes,” he explains, “and at the same time, be true to my faith and my identity and that there was no conflict of terms there.”

Aletha Maybank ’96 says she often receives emails like the recent one from a graduate student at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“You are a role model and a light in the darkness when I am feeling down or feel that I don’t have the capability of making it,” the student wrote. “I really appreciate you and the example you have made for upcoming professionals, especially black women.”

Maybank, an assistant health commissioner in New York City, who is a pediatrician by training but mostly works in the space of her second residency training as a preventive/public health physician, is a reluctant—though flattered—role model. “I did not set out in life to be an inspiration,” she says. “But I am always thankful and recognize my responsibility [to respond with encouragement].”

 

“I think they see a woman of color who looks like them, in a place that’s more public, and seems to be successful and living out a particular area of her passion,” she muses. “I’m doing what they want to do.”

In her position as assistant health commissioner, Maybank oversees a bureau called the District Public Health Office, which is responsible for public health issues in some of Brooklyn’s most at-risk communities, including Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville, Bushwick, and East New York.

Her office’s mission: promoting health equity and reducing health inequalities for low-income families and communities of color.

Toward that end, she works to address and improve infant mortality rates and maternal health, and to promote physical activity through City Bike and other programs. She also connects with farmers markets and community grocery stores to promote healthy eating.

Maybank, who holds an MD from Temple and an MPH from Columbia University, admits that improving current health care disparities is a daunting challenge. “The reality is, if we don’t take care of those who are the sickest, it will be very hard to change overall health indicators for everyone,” says Maybank. “Resolving inequities in health will in part depend on how well we as a country resolve income, education, and employment disparities—which is hard to do. It’s just not easy to know what it is going to take to reduce the gap.”

Outside of her work as health commissioner, Maybank has addressed public health through a number of outlets including “Doctor’s Orders,” a series of columns in Ebony magazine; MSNBC’s the Melissa Harris-Perry show; as well as on ARISE America, a news program on the global channel ARISE TV. She is also a co-founder, with her friend and fellow physician Myiesha Taylor, of Artemis Medical Society, an organization that supports female physicians of color through networking, advocacy, and mentoring.

Younger audiences might recognize Maybank, however, from the We Are Doc McStuffins videos she and several colleagues made for Disney Junior. The animated series features a 5-year-old African-American girl who doctors her stuffed animals with professional aplomb. In their videos, Maybank and her colleagues demonstrate the real life future of the popular fictional character.

Maybank’s video is a sweet coincidence: She was given a doctor’s kit as a child after her mother heard her daughter announce that she wanted to be either a dancer or a cashier when she grew up.

“My mom shared with me recently that she thought she needed to suggest some other career choices in my life, so she went out immediately, got the doctor’s kit, and that is what I got for Christmas that year—at 4 years old,” Maybank recalls. “Little did she know I would enjoy it so much that it would inspire me to be a doctor.”

More than a few magical creatures inhabit the equally magical Cloisters Museum and Gardens on the northern tip of Manhattan. Monkeys spring from carved columns, unicorns glow on dark tapestries in even darker rooms, a lion glowers from a fresco. Then there’s the dragon coiled on the brass belt buckle shining at the waist of C. Griffith Mann ’02 (PhD), the Michel David-Weill Curator in Charge of the Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Mann, who goes by the nickname Griff, may sport sartorial whimsy (he’s also fond of bow ties and patterned socks), but he’s very serious about his mission at the Met: to present the museum’s collection in both exciting and accessible ways that make the medieval world come alive for visitors or, as he puts it, “to open up a window into a world that is much more complicated and engaging than most people imagine.”

“We tend to have this sense about the medieval world, that it’s the Dark Ages and people were walking around in burlap sacks and there was plague and disease, and somehow it was always dark and rainy,” says Mann, who received his doctorate in history of art from the Krieger School. Instead, he points out, the medieval period was one of tremendous creativity, trade, and innovation. The Middle Ages witnessed the rise of the first universities and the building of magnificent cathedrals, where much of the era’s art was displayed and used as a primary means of communication with an audience that was illiterate. “These paintings and other objects are now collected as works of art,” explains Mann. “But when they were made, their primary function was something very different, something that was not solely aesthetic. Medieval art was embedded in people’s lives in a way I’ve always found very exciting,” he says.

Mann joined the Met in September 2013 after six years as deputy director and chief curator of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Prior to that, he was director of the curatorial division of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, a continuation of some of the work he did there as the first Zanvyl Krieger Fellow. “Working half time on my dissertation project and half time at the museum had a profound influence not only on my research but on my trajectory as well,” explains Mann, who says he was drawn to study at Hopkins by the art history department’s international reputation as an intellectual stronghold for study in medieval and Renaissance art.  “The program was—and still is—incredibly rigorous, and the education I received has benefited me in my professional life.”

At the Met, Mann divides his time between the main building, which displays medieval art within the broader context of an encyclopedic collection, and The Cloisters, which presents part of the museum’s collection from the western European Middle Ages in an environment that evokes an ecclesiastical or monastic setting. While the role of a curator at many institutions has changed and expanded in the 20 years since Mann began his career, the size of the Met’s collections (roughly 14,000 objects make up both locations’ total medieval holdings), in addition to its annual 6 million visitors, adds to the position’s challenges. In addition to maintaining, growing, and displaying a collection, says Mann, a curator must be a scholar, a fundraiser, and perhaps most importantly, a teacher.

“My goal is to get people to find a way of connecting to something that at first might seem really esoteric or distant,” he explains. In addition to making those connections through curated exhibits like the recent Radiant Light: Stained Glass from Canterbury Cathedral at the Cloisters, Mann and other curators at the Met are turning to various technologies to help them tell the stories of their collections, such as the Met’s video series called 82nd & Fifth.

Making videos of medieval art doesn’t feel like a stretch for Mann, who explains that “medieval art is a multimedia experience” in Terrible Beauty, the video he recorded for the series. His topic: an altarpiece panel of the Archangel Michael  casting Satan—here embodied as a fabulous beast made up of bits of many bizarre creatures including bird claws, lizards, and random eyeballs—down from heaven. The painting would have originally been in a church where the full array of incense, music, and prayer would have added a sensory context to the painting’s celebration of the triumph of good over evil. “As a museum curator, one of the opportunities—and responsibilities—you have is to find ways of opening windows onto material that you yourself find fascinating and are passionate about,” says Mann. “And I was fascinated with that incredible beast. I think something like that connects you with the fertile possibilities of the human imagination.”