Marc Duvoisin ’77 is one of those enviable people who discovered his vocation early on. Perhaps it was the omnipresence of print in the four or five newspapers his family had delivered daily to their New Jersey home. Or the example of his mother, a freelance writer and a stringer for newspapers, poring over headlines and absorbing stories. Or his self-proclaimed fascination with seeing his own byline that led Duvoisin, now managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, to launch his journalism career by publishing a newspaper for his third grade class. “[Journalism] was my goal from early childhood,” he says of his 30-plus years in newspapers. “I never had a doubt or a moment’s hesitation.”

Duvoisin’s classroom paper was the first in a series of news writing gigs that began with The (Bergen) Record in Hackensack, New Jersey, and included 20 years at The Philadelphia Inquirer (including a four-year stint in the Middle East reporting the Iran-Iraq War and the bombing of Libya). Duvoisin moved to Los Angeles in 2001 to become the assistant managing editor of the LA Times and was named managing editor in July 2012.

Despite his clear career ambitions, Duvoisin chose Johns Hopkins even though the university did not offer a journalism major or any journalism classes. Instead, he majored in humanistic studies and followed what he describes as the more common preparation for journalism in the 1970s: “to try to become well read and kind of cosmopolitan [with the hope that] you would bring that to your writing.” Courses with Humanities Center faculty such as William Freehling, John Highham, and an intensely memorable seminar on Tristram Shandy co-taught by Richard Macksey and Samuel Weber, says Duvoisin, taught him “how to sustain an argument, how to argue a point with passion and precision.”

As a staff member of the Johns Hopkins News-Letter, Duvoisin put theory into practice. He recalls the office as the de facto center for a small but serious group of future writers, including publisher and writer Russ Smith and music critic J.D. Considine, who were inspired by former News-Letter editors like Russell Baker, Alger Hiss, and Richard Ben Kramer (whose self-penned News-Letter style guide Duvoisin discovered one night while rummaging through the office’s ancient metal desk). The News-Letter staff, says Duvoisin, would spend late hours in the office talking about writing. “Journalism was very sexy at that time,” says Duvoisin, pointing to the popularity of the book (and film) All the President’s Men, with its glamorous depictions of reporters and newsrooms breaking the Watergate scandal. “There was a wonderful culture and wonderful kind of excitement in the air about writing,” he says. “Even though there was no journalism program [at Hopkins], people wanted to be writers.”

Today’s media climate, concedes Duvoisin, bears little resemblance to Hollywood’s version of The Washington Post (or even the News-Letter, for that matter). As managing editor, Duvoisin oversees all news departments, though the challenges of a continuous news cycle fueled by electronic and social media add another layer of urgency to news reporting. “There’s no longer that rhythm that my generation grew up with, where you’re aiming towards the evening deadline,” says Duvoisin, who responds to email within minutes and tweets several times a day (he also plays piano and reads about physics to decompress). Instead, the 24/7 news cycle creates more of an on-demand service. “[Readers] don’t wait for us to bring the news to them,” he says. “They come to us.”

Like most news organizations, the LA Times is determined to find ways to improve readers’ online experience—through additional content including video, photo galleries, interactive graphics, and searchable databases, along with a redesign to make the site more visually engaging—and to convert that growing readership into a revenue base via online subscriptions.

Still, Duvoisin doesn’t forecast an imminent demise of print media, mostly thanks, he says, to educated baby boomers who continue to want the “tactile experience” of a newspaper. Nor does Duvoisin predict an end to journalism as a viable career, though he acknowledges that the traditional vocational path of journalists—working in a small paper and moving up to larger newsrooms—“has broken down along with the revenue base of the industry.”

“Writing for pay is a much more challenging proposition than when I got into the business,” says Duvoisin, citing fellowships, internships, and training programs, including ones offered by the LA Times, as the new model of journalism apprenticeship. “What’s inspiring is, despite difficulties, people are still drawn to the business and determined to make their way around the obstacles.”

There’s little question that media platforms will continue to evolve, yet Duvoisin stresses the value of unique, well-written content—from investigative scoops to deeply reported narratives—over what he calls the “commodity news” available from a multiplicity of sources in more or less the same form. “We help people cut through the noise and make sense of the world,” he says. “And that is valuable. Enduringly valuable.”

In 2003, on the National Institutes of Health campus in Bethesda, Maryland, ophthalmologist Janine Austin Clayton ’84 had a serendipitous experience at a health exhibit for the National Eye Institute. There, a young woman, about 20 years old and wearing baggy, cartoon-covered pajama bottoms, asked her about treatment for her red and burning eyes. During a consult, Clayton, who was in the middle of a seven-year stint as NEI’s deputy clinical director, saw that the young patient, who was already being treated at NIH for premature ovarian failure, also had dry eye, a condition that primarily affects older women. After reading that young women with this disease often have estrogen and androgen levels low enough to indicate menopause, Clayton designed a study and discovered that dry eye can be a symptom of premature ovarian failure in 18- to 25-year-old women. (Her research was published in Archives of Ophthalmology in 2004.) This experience, which drove home how sex and gender can influence health and disease, is one of many that has prepared Clayton for her recent appointment to director of the Office of Research on Women’s Health and associate director for Research on Women’s Health at NIH.

Clayton, who has authored or co-authored more than 65 research papers about eye diseases, did not plan to become an advocate for women’s health. As an undergraduate natural sciences student at Johns Hopkins, however, she “got bitten by the research bug” while working in a genetics lab, where she developed her first research questions and then designed studies to answer them. “[Hopkins’] focus on research does make a difference,” says Clayton, who married fellow graduate Robert B. Clayton ’84, an attorney, in 2008. “Every school does not have that focus.” Later, a class about delivering health care, which covered population issues and access to services, introduced her to the policy side of medicine.

In medical school, Clayton chose to specialize in ophthalmology. In the mid-1990s, she became aware of the role that sex and gender influences play in health and disease during her fellowship in cornea and external diseases at the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins Hospital. While there, she developed an interest in Sjögren’s syndrome, an autoimmune disease that affects nine women for every one man. Today, Clayton still remembers a 70-year-old patient with the syndrome whose “immune cells were attacking her eyes and melting the tissue”; the legally blind woman needed four corneal transplants. Then, during her next fellowship at NEI, she noticed that more female patients had uveitis, another autoimmune ocular disease that can cause calcium deposits, cataracts, and scarring.

Clayton, who in September 2012 became the second director of ORWH since the office was established in 1990, now wants other researchers and physicians across specialties to consider how sex and gender influence their work. “Understanding these influences could change the way [physicians] practice,” she says. Take, for example, the sleep-inducing drug Ambien, which is processed more slowly in women’s bodies. If women take the same dosage as men, the drug may impair their functioning the next day. “[This reaction] is not related to women being smaller than men or weighing less than men,” Clayton says. “[It’s] a basic biological difference between females and males in how they respond to the drug.”

Guided by a mission to ensure that NIH’s 27 institutes and centers have women’s health research on their agendas, Clayton is focused on achieving ORWH’s six strategic goals by 2020, including encouraging the medical community to design technologies, medical devices, therapeutic drugs, and prevention and treatment plans with women and girls in mind. This year, she’ll concentrate on increasing the number of scientists who think about sex differences when designing studies, from formulating hypotheses to reporting findings. “We’re trying to infuse this [thought] process throughout the entire research continuum,” she says.

This is a new frontier for many of her peers, but Clayton is ready for the challenge, as long as she is making a difference.

Robert Ford

In January 2011, Robert Stephen Ford ’80 became the first U.S. ambassador to Syria in more than five years. A photo marking the occasion shows him sitting beside Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in matching powder-blue armchairs.

“My hands are politely folded so I don’t leap out of the chair and start arguing with him,” Ford says of the image. “I didn’t go there with a lot of expectations because our relationship with Syria has been so contentious for so many years.”

And things would quickly tilt from bad to worse once the Arab Spring movement reached Syria just a few weeks later, in the form of the first tentative public protests against government repression. Ford and his staff made no friends in Assad’s circle by meeting with opposition leaders and giving eyewitness accounts of their peaceful protest. A resolute Assad eventually turned troops loose on the movement, birthing a bloody civil war. Barely a year after arriving in Damascus, with his own safety now in doubt, Ford performed an ambassador’s most woeful duty: hauling down the American flag and shutting the embassy. “We felt like we were abandoning the Syrian activists,” Ford says.

A departure from dangerous Damascus is but the latest dramatic event in a 28-year Foreign Service career spent largely in the Middle East amid rough diplomatic waters. Ford’s past postings include four years as counselor and deputy of mission at the U.S. embassy in Iraq, and ambassador to troubled Algeria. “What distinguishes my career is that I’ve been in a lot of countries where political change has been a vitally urgent issue, even to the point of armed conflict,” Ford says. “There’s never a dull moment.”

Curiously, a desire to work in this part of the world was born in a darkened movie theater back in his native Denver. “I saw the film Lawrence of Arabia when I was a teenager and fell in love with it,” he says. “I became intrigued with the Middle East.”

His cinema-spawned interest in a world beyond our borders led him to Johns Hopkins in 1976, where he embarked on a five-year BA/MA international studies program involving three years at Homewood and two at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. He began learning Arabic while in Washington and later landed a spot in a highly competitive, intensive Arabic language program in Cairo. A Peace Corps stint in Morocco cemented his interest in the Arab world while opening his eyes to its challenges. “It’s one thing to sit in a class and talk about a disconnection between government and a population, and a very different thing to see it up close,” Ford says.

He joined the State Department in 1985, where today he heads a team in daily contact with activists in Syria while working with regional partners and the United Nations to resolve a conflict that is estimated to have killed 70,000. “We want to help achieve a political transition in Syria which enables Syrians to be free,” Ford says. “We don’t see how Assad, who has used everything from rockets to Scud missiles to aircraft to just plain torture, has any legitimacy now.”

Despite this ongoing conflict, and the political setbacks and unrest some other Arab Spring movements (such as those in Egypt and Tunisia) are experiencing, Ford remains hopeful for the region’s democratic future.

“These societies have a very different historical experience from our own, but there is a certain common, universal human drive to have freedom,” he says. “There’s no reason to assume that Arab societies, which have long been bottled up by political oppression, will find answers to tough problems in two or three years. There will obviously be some trial and error and some excess along the way. I think it’s important for us to be in regular contact with the movers and shakers of these societies, which could be a businessman, a shopkeeper on the street, or top political leaders and generals. We don’t tell them what to do, but rather share a perspective and remind them that there are certain universal standards to which they will be held accountable.”

And if he could pull up a powder-blue armchair alongside Assad today?

“If I would sit with him now, my question would be this: Is it really worth destroying your country for you to stay in power? The killing and destruction, is it worth it to you?”

The Krieger School community continues to mourn the untimely loss of one of its own—Anne Smedinghoff ’09, who was killed April 6 during a suicide bomber attack in the Zabul Province of Afghanistan. A U.S. diplomat, she was driving with a group of other Americans to donate textbooks for Afghan school students. Three U.S. soldiers and another American employee were also killed.

Smedinghoff, 25, joined the U.S. Foreign Service just after her graduation from Johns Hopkins as an international studies major. Her parents, Tom and Mary Beth Smedinghoff, released a statement saying, “We are consoled knowing that she was doing what she loved, and that she was serving her country by helping to make a positive difference in the world.”

Smedinghoff’s first assignment for the U.S. Foreign Service was in Caracas, Venezuela. After that she volunteered for the Afghanistan assignment. According to a report in The Washington Post, Smedinghoff was to complete that assignment in July. She was preparing to learn Arabic before embarking on a two-year assignment in Algeria.

In the days after it happened, Smedinghoff’s death received national attention. Just the week before, she had been selected to support Secretary of State John Kerry during his visit to Afghanistan. “She was everything a Foreign Service officer should be: smart, capable, eager to serve, and deeply committed to our country and the difference she was making for the Afghan people,” said Kerry. “She tragically gave her young life working to give young Afghans the opportunity to have a better future.”

Anne Smedinghoff Memorial Fund

The Anne Smedinghoff Memorial Fund at Johns Hopkins University will provide support for students who wish to pursue activities in international development or diplomacy.

Remembering Anne Smedinghoff

Friends and former classmates of Anne Smedinghoff ’09 were shocked and saddened by her untimely death on April 6 in Afghanistan. They remember her as brave, bright, focused, and friendly.

“Anne was a huge reason why I wanted to become a Foreign Service officer. She was smart, vibrant, economically/politically/socially conscious, and she always seemed to be having fun with whatever she was doing. Anne remained so positive about small successes across Afghanistan: inklings toward a more open press, emergence of women-owned small businesses, and of course, the work that the State Department was doing to prop up education, particularly for young girls. Anne was never naïve to the challenges, and we spoke frankly about difficult issues in security, infrastructure, and unfortunate corruption. She kept the faith—and an adventurous heart—as she continued supporting projects that would make a difference in the lives of Afghans.”
–Julie Miller ’07

“I participated in the Mock Trial team at Johns Hopkins with Anne during my freshman year. She was a senior at the time and vice president of the program. She was always an inspiration to me for how dedicated she was. Through our many tournaments over the year, I learned that she was also a constant joy to be around. Mock Trial at JHU has grown in recent years to be one of the most competitive teams in the nation, and I attribute a large part of that to her influence upon it.”
–Jordan Glassberg ’12

“I met Anne at Johns Hopkins in 2009 during a team meeting to prepare for a summer bicycle trek from Baltimore to San Francisco. Our mission was to raise funds, spread awareness, and foster hope in the fight against cancer, and Anne took on the duty of managing our communications, raising the profile of our organization’s commitment to serve the cause of cancer awareness and prevention. The first few days of cycling snake through the Appalachians—dizzying ascents, sweltering humidity, and aggressive drivers are but a few of the obstacles. Not once would Anne speak oft-heard complaints. Pummeled by heat, lightning, hail, or downpours, Anne pedaled with determination, with a resilience to honor those we met along the way and for the memory of her grandfather, for whom she dedicated her ride. It was obvious we were in the presence of someone extraordinary.”
–excerpted from an op-ed article written by Raffi Joe Wartanian ’08, and published in The Baltimore Sun.

“Anne was such a good listener—she had a real talent for making people feel special and important. I remember how she used to laugh at my jokes (even the stupid ones) as if they were really hilarious. She was so easy to get along with and open up to. I still can’t believe what has happened to her.”
–Esther Bochner Schwalb ‘08