Trying to Build Bridges with Syria

Fall 2018

Robert Ford

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?”

An Eye on Gender and Health

Fall 2018

alumn_claytonIn 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.

Cutting Through the Noise of News

Fall 2018

alum_duvoisinMarc 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.”

Telling an Untold Story

Fall 2018

The question posed by a well-intentioned undergraduate student during a course on anti-Semitism nagged at Professor Benjamin Ginsberg. “How come the Jews didn’t resist the Nazis?” the student asked Ginsberg, the David Bernstein Professor of Political Science and director of Johns Hopkins’ Washington Center for Advanced Governmental Studies.

“A lot of people ask this, but it isn’t true,” says Ginsberg. “Jews weren’t really able to resist in the ghettos and concentration camps—it was an unarmed populace surrounded by armed guards more than happy to kill them—but if you broaden the definition of ‘resistance,’ they did resist. So I went home and thought, ‘There’s a book here.’”

The result is Ginsberg’s 21st book, How the Jews Defeated Hitler: Exploding the Myth of Jewish Passivity in the Face of Nazism, which was released in April. Methodically and comprehensively, the book explores how world Jewry came together to fight the Nazis on myriad fronts during World War II. And in the process, it shatters the widely held belief that Jews during the Holocaust went down without a fight.

“Other books have focused on areas [in which Jews] were heroic but not decisive in the outcome of the war,” Ginsberg says. “But Jews had a tremendous impact. No one before has ever looked at the Jewish effort as a whole, from a variety of countries.”

How the Jews Defeated Hitler delves into the manner in which Jews in the Soviet Union were at the forefront of Joseph Stalin’s war against the Nazis. Despite virulent anti-Semitism and persecution in their country, Soviet Jews were highly important in the development and production of arms, the gathering of intelligence, and as soldiers and military leaders in the Red Army. (Ginsberg’s father served in a Soviet artillery regiment.)

In particular, Ginsberg notes that in the face of a German invasion, Jewish engineers were prescient and highly instrumental in the evacuation and reorganization of the Soviet military industrial complex from the western regions of the USSR to locations east of the Ural Mountains.

“Without the Jews, I feel the Soviets couldn’t have won the war,” he says. “The Soviets won because they built and used weapons superior to the Germans’, that were all built by Jewish engineers.”

Similarly, Jews in the United States played an essential role in the war effort. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, they formed a key alliance with white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who steered public opinion away from isolationists and pro-German (and anti-British) factions. Jews and the East Coast Protestant establishment were also important to the Roosevelt administration’s objectives of rearmament and conscription, as well as the passage of the Lend-Lease Act, the 1941 program that permitted the United States to provide materials and supplies to England and other Allied nations prior to America’s entrance into World War II.

“Without Lend-Lease, Britain might have been defeated, and the Soviet Union would have been in even more desperate straits,” Ginsberg says.

Like their co-religionists in the USSR and Great Britain, American Jews were greatly influential in the fields of espionage and intelligence. For example, Ginsberg points out that America’s foremost cryptanalyst, William Friedman, was a Jew, as were many members of the U.S. Army’s Signals Intelligence Service (precursor to the Army Security Agency). In addition, Jews working in the media, particularly the motion picture industry, were heavily involved in the campaigns informing the public why buying war bonds and paying income taxes were critical to defeating the Axis.

In contrast to their numbers in the general population, Jews disproportionately served in the U.S. Army during the war (about 10,500 American Jewish soldiers died, and 25,000 were wounded in WWII). And of course, the Manhattan Project, which led to the development of the atomic bomb, overwhelmingly consisted of Jewish scientists.

Regarding resistance groups, Ginsberg says Jews were largely involved in such outfits across Europe. But he cautions that with the exception of partisans in the Soviet Union, resistance groups—while disruptive of Nazi military supply lines—were “limited” in their role in the defeat of Nazism.

As for Jews in European villages, ghettos, and concentration camps, Ginsberg warns against snap judgments. “Unarmed civilians were easily rounded up and murdered,” he says. “But that’s not the totality of it. That’s part of it, but not all of what happened to Jews during World War II.”

Ginsberg hopes How the Jews Defeated Hitler sets the record straight and punches holes into any stereotypes or misconceptions. “I’m trying to provide a counterweight to the story people think they know,” he said. “[Jews] weren’t cowardly lambs led to the slaughter, or the futile resister at the Warsaw Ghetto. Jews played a significant role in the war.”

Enthusiasm Awakened

Fall 2018

“Nothing has more power to attract and hold the attention of students, to awaken and sustain their enthusiasm than the constant presence of the tangible remains of antiquity, the actual work of Greek and Roman hands. To students who by daily contact have become familiar with these things and understand their significance the men of old are real persons and their classical literature becomes the expression of real life.” –Dr. Harry Langford Wilson, professor of Classics, The Johns Hopkins University, 1908, writing on the Archaeological Museum.

More than a century after classics Professor Wilson shared these sentiments, Hopkins’ Archaeological Museum remains dedicated to providing “tangible” inspiration for student research. In April, the museum hosted its second symposium highlighting such work. Both undergraduate and graduate students presented a diverse array of projects—including research on Roman funerary urns, chemical analysis of two ancient Roman curse tablets, and a study of the Myers Amduat Papyrus (ca. 1000 BCE) that depicts the last section of the nocturnal journey of the sun god Ra through the underworld.

By considering different aspects of archaeological objects and art—historical, cultural, religious, technical, and scientific—student presenters demonstrated the importance of examining artifacts through various lenses.

For more on the symposium and the Archaeological Museum, visit archaeologicalmuseum.jhu.edu.

RomanUrns

Photo of Roman Urn courtesy of the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum

Creating Health Care Opportunities in Poor Nations

Fall 2018

“We were literally just throwing medicine at people—‘Here, take it, and it’ll fix your problems’—but people would come back again and again with the same problems. We weren’t fixing anything.” That’s what Sminu Bose ’12 says about her first attempt at saving the world. As a freshman majoring in molecular and cellular biology, with a minor in entrepreneurship and management, she and 14 volunteers from Global Medical Brigades helped two local physicians set up health clinics in Honduras, where they saw 1,000 patients a day. It was a dramatic introduction to the problems plaguing global health care.

Bose, a recipient of a Woodrow Wilson research award, began thinking about how to change the lifestyle—and ultimately the health—of those patients. She returned to Honduras a year later with another group, this time to help the community establish a microfinance bank. This type of bank extends small loans to individuals, businesses, and organizations in low-income regions, including underdeveloped countries where small amounts of money can go a long way. “Give someone a loan to start a business,” she says, “and you’re hoping they’ll have a steady income, and they’ll be able to take care of health, education, and other needs.”

But despite their attempts to make the bank sustainable, the seed capital for these small-business loans was often given instead to friends and family for personal use. “It was a disappointment—to think ‘I’m going to save the world,’ and unfortunately things don’t turn out the way you want.”

Still determined to make a difference, Bose turned her attention to microhealth insurance, a new industry seeking to make insurance affordable for people living below the poverty line by providing them with low premiums.  Her Woodrow Wilson fellowship enabled her to study those systems in Calcutta and Wayanad, India, and Phnom Penh, Cambodia—three areas chosen specifically for their differences.

In Cambodia, Bose found a bank-run system offering insurance to people who already had microloans; they were making some money but not very much. The poorest still had no insurance.

In India, the government subsidized premiums for those below the poverty level, though communication regarding the loan was often a challenge in big cities like Calcutta. Once past the hurdle of getting the word to large numbers of poor people, it was even tougher to convince them to pay money toward something that might happen.

Microinsurance was most successful in small villages like Wayanad, where women’s and family groups spread the word, and enrollment was high. But the facilities serving that population were too far away, so the benefits were mostly unused.

Praising Bose’s “dogged determination,” her adviser Eric Rice, senior lecturer at Johns Hopkins’ Center for Leadership Education, says, “She was able to compare lessons learned [painfully] in one location with emerging plans in another. Not only has she expanded her own knowledge, but also her efforts leave behind a richer range of experience available for other JHU students.”

Drawing on Art

Fall 2018

Craig Hankin ’76, director of Homewood Art Workshops, talks about why the arts play a critical role at a major research university.

Defining and defending the role of the arts in a research university is nothing new to me. I’ve been doing it at Johns Hopkins for decades, first as an undergraduate in the mid-’70s and since the early ’80s as an instructor, when my allies included “Reds” Wolman, Dick Macksey, John Barth, and Michael Fried. And every time I’ve been called upon to do it, I hope it will be the last. We shall see.

The beneficial impact of making art, whether visual, musical, or theatrical—as opposed to the academic study of the arts, per the humanities—has, like the reality of global climate change, been verified by hard data. For instance, the National Endowment for the Arts’ “How Art Works,” a five-year research project featuring a brilliant “system map” and measurement model, shows definitively that engagement with the arts contributes to quality of life in a virtuous cycle from the individual to the societal level, and back. In 2011, the ArtsEngine Task Force at the University of Michigan determined that integrating artists and art making into research universities helped them maintain institutional competitiveness, provided students with invaluable cognitive diversity and creative support, and offered potentially groundbreaking interdisciplinary collaborations.

Closer to home, my colleagues in the Homewood Art Workshops have found that the creative processes and problem-solving strategies we teach benefit our students in their other course work, as well. The arts teach people to look at reality from different angles. They teach creativity, which is applicable and valuable in every avenue of human endeavor. They teach skills, including perceptual skills, which actually improve the process of thinking and reasoning. In fact, the ability to be flexible in the interpretation of data is a key component of success in research, and making art helps students develop exactly this sort of cognitive flexibility. Why wouldn’t a research university—or a potential employer—want individuals who are also trained to think outside the box, who have been taught to look beyond the expected outcome and consider additional and unexpected possibilities?

Consider the case of Drummond Fielding, who was a student in my Studio Drawing I class in the fall of 2010. A physics major then in his junior year, Drummond had never before taken an art course. His drawings that semester were nothing short of revelatory. Responding in particular to exercises from our textbook, Betty Edwards’ landmark Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Drummond produced work of extraordinary accomplishment in a variety of media and genres. He earned one of the few A+ grades I’ve ever given.

The following semester, Drummond stopped by my office for a brief visit. After catching up a bit, he told me that he had also scored an A+ in Quantum Mechanics and Honors Real Analysis. Those two courses, he said, were quite different—and more challenging—than anything he had taken prior to that point. Drawing I, he explained, forced him to explore new thought patterns and helped open channels in his mind that proved highly useful in learning those complex subjects.

In his senior year, Drummond attended a physics and astronomy departmental meeting, where undergraduates were given the opportunity to voice their concerns and recommendations to the faculty. He suggested that Drawing I be put on the list of recommended courses for incoming freshmen. “Thinking about physics requires visual thinking,” he told me later, “and visual arts train you in how to use those modes of thought.  Physics, done right, is a visual art—albeit mostly visualized in physicists’ heads.”

Upon graduation last spring, Drummond was awarded the Donald E. Kerr Memorial Medal as the outstanding undergraduate major in physics and astronomy. He is currently in the Astrophysics MS-PhD program at UC Berkeley, where his tuition is paid by a Berkeley Fellowship and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. He is conducting research with professors Chris McKee and Richard Klein on the disks that form around protostars as they collapse. “It is a very interesting problem that has ramifications for planet and star formation, and even galaxy structure. Plus we get to make some really cool movies and images,” he writes.

What more do you need to know?

CraigHankin-artclass

Craig Hankin works with a student in his portrait drawing class.

Finding Truth in Family Fictions

Fall 2018

Tierra Langley ’15 is keeping a journal where she reflects on the minutiae of her daily life. She notes her interactions with the family members who share her home and what she makes for dinner. She documents the challenges of stretching a budget that has no room for extras, and of being an African-American in an industrial city and a displaced Southerner in an unfamiliar northern state, an early refugee from North Carolina before the rush of the Great Migration.

That the journal is fictional, written from the perspective of a grandmother in the early 20th century, makes it no less of a powerful learning exercise for Langley and the other students in Katrina Bell McDonald’s course—The African-American Family. By the end of the semester, these initial observations and musings, combined with reflections on class readings and lectures, personal experience and discussion, film and literature, will result in the Black Family Saga, a narrative each student writes based on the life of a fictional character who exists within a larger fictional family.

“The first time I assigned it, students kind of looked at me like, ‘What?’” says McDonald, an associate professor in the Department of Sociology. “But when they got to the end, they said, ‘This is so amazing to be able to think this through.’ [That’s why] I keep doing it.”

McDonald had already taught a version of The African-American Family several times before joining the Johns Hopkins faculty in 1994, and has taught it about every two years since. Although there have been small changes to the class (mostly to the reading list as new research emerges), the goal of the course remains constant. “I really want students to have accurate information about what’s going on with black families,” says McDonald. “I want to help them understand or at least question the role of Africa in the lives of African-Americans. I want them to get the story of slavery right.”

Although the syllabus for the course includes literature and lectures covering a broad range of key concepts that affect black families, the dynamics of black marriage and child-rearing—areas that McDonald designates as “Black Intimacies”—are historically the students’ favorite topic of discussion, she says. “Many of the students will say that they were surprised to find that there were so many things that they didn’t know,” says McDonald. “It’s information they think they can use in the true sense as an African-American—because most of the students are African-American—and that they really take this information in as applicable to their own lives.”

That all students, not just those who are African-American, make personal connections to the material is a given for McDonald, who often shares stories of her own family when relevant. “Particularly in social science, that’s the way it all makes sense,” explains McDonald. “You get a mass of data—census data, ethnographic data—the relevance comes in when you see a link somewhere.”

The Black Family Saga project, in particular, enables students to walk a mile in another person’s shoes by entering the world of an African-American family on a personal level. It also prompts them to make sense of what they have read and observed. Early in the semester, small groups of students meet to create their fictional families, deciding kinship roles, negotiating their family’s historical period, geographic location, social class, and related demographics, and together making decisions about their family’s trajectory based on class readings and lectures. Each student then writes his or her own narrative based on the perspective of the family member the student has created. “It’s a really interesting approach that gives us the ability to submerge ourselves in an African-American family to gain perspective of what it’s like,” says sociology major Rafee Al-Mansur ’13. “Playing the role makes you think about different dynamics from a different perspective.”

Students also credit McDonald’s class with giving them a broader historical perspective and helping them find their place within it. While Tierra Langley characterizes the Black Family Saga project as “unique” (and fun, too, she says), she has been moved most by the multilayered analyses of the past. “The African-American family is a lot more complex than I ever expected,” says Langley, who is a double major in public health and Africana studies. “So much of the history is just sad and awful and at the same time, people prevailed and were strong.

“Professor McDonald has said this several times, but it’s just sinking in, that the African-American family has survived despite slavery, despite Jim Crow,” she continues. “The full weight of the past is just shocking to me.” While McDonald acknowledges that students can get depressed by the accounts of systematic mistreatment and racism they read, she also sees the course as empowering—whether it be the gateway to an honor’s thesis and future research or a better understanding of where their own family fits into the larger community. “At the end of it all,” says McDonald, “I learn about the students’ yearnings. I learn about what really matters to them in this material.”

Science of Learning Institute

Fall 2018

scienceoflearning

The science of how humans learn is a complex, multitiered challenge. With the recently launched university-wide Science of Learning Institute, Johns Hopkins experts are positioned to be transformative leaders in understanding how we learn.

The website for the Science of Learning Institute illustrates its mission to understand the nature of learning at all levels of scientific inquiry, from changes at the level of synapses to the nature of cognitive change over the life span and the implications of these for education and learning in formal and informal settings.

Moving through the site you can see some of the provocative questions the institute’s work will address, such as, How does genetic variation interact with the environment to change development? Viewers can also explore the research and laboratories of professors like Michael McCloskey, whose cognitive science team is working to discover and treat a new form of reading impairment. Or take a virtual visit to the Computational Sensory–Motor Systems Lab, where neuroengineers design prosthetic devices that interface with the brain and spinal cord, posing exciting new possibilities for those with spinal injury.

The institute also provides funding opportunities to individuals and teams exploring the science of learning.

Undergrads Curate Exhibit About Post-war Jewish Life in Baltimore

Fall 2018

They are the pictures of suburban bliss: a smiling young mother playing with her children in their backyard pool. A man and a boy approach the Jewish Community Center, hand in hand. A shovel-wielding rabbi breaks ground for a new synagogue. These are just a few glimpses of life illustrated in the exhibit, Jews on the Move: Baltimore and the Suburban Exodus, 1945–1968, curated in part by Johns Hopkins undergraduates.

With support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Johns Hopkins University Program in Museums and Society partners with local museums to take undergraduate students out of the classroom and give them hands-on museum experience. In spring 2012, staff from the Jewish Museum of Maryland taught a course at Johns Hopkins that involved students in the creation of the exhibit, from conducting historical research and mining the archives to communicating effectively through writing and design.

Jews on the Move explores the postwar relocation of Baltimore’s Jewish community from the city to the northwest suburbs of Baltimore County. In the years following World War II, Baltimore Jews, like so many other Americans, left behind urban neighborhoods in pursuit of the American dream. Within the span of a single generation, the Baltimore Jewish community swiftly reconfigured itself and experienced a social, economic, and cultural transformation. The exhibit offers a local focus on a national story of suburbanization.

“It is both trying to talk about this particular experience, for this particular group of people,” says Elizabeth Rodini, director of the Program in Museums and Society, “but there is a broader relevance; lots of people went through this type of experience. It’s not unique to the Jewish community; it’s not unique to Baltimore, this whole shift to suburban life. [The exhibit conveys] something unique about the Baltimore experience, but also connects to people through what they know.”

Rodini says seven Krieger School students worked on the exhibit, giving them valuable hands-on experience. “One of the most rewarding opportunities for students in the Museums and Society Program is the chance to get off campus and work in real-life situations—with professionals in the field and on projects with a public face. The lessons learned in the museum are unlike anything we can provide in the classroom.”

For sophomore Molly Martell, the biggest advantage to being one of the student curators was the opportunity to work with so many in the field.

“We got to work with a designer, some curators, and staff who worked with collections and archives, so we really got to talk with an array of people who are involved in the process,” says Martel.

The fruits of the collaboration came in October, with the exhibit’s opening. “The hardest part was that by the end of it, [the project] was kind of our baby, and then we had to hand it off to the staff… We had all gotten so invested in it,” says Martell. “It was much more than just a class on learning how to put together an exhibit. It also gave me a broader knowledge about things that I wasn’t familiar with from my background.”

A traveling exhibit, Jews on the Move is on display in Hodson Hall on the Homewood campus through December 17, seven days a week, 8 a.m.–10 p.m. From there it will move to other locations in the Baltimore area.

Image Gallery

Professor’s New Film Puts Students to Work

Fall 2018

When Matthew Porterfield’s eagerly awaited film, I Used to Be Darker, debuts in early 2013, several Johns Hopkins film majors will be listed in the credits.

“With each of my films, we’ve had JHU [and Maryland Institute College of Art] students fulfilling internship or independent study requirements on production,” says Porterfield, a lecturer in the Film and Media Studies Program. He employed students and recent graduates as grips, best boys, camera assistants, and sound technicians.

“I like to create an atmosphere where people are learning on the job. It makes everybody work a little harder and gives the production process more meaning and fresh energy,” says Porterfield, 34. “Our film and media studies students are extremely capable and dedicated, but most haven’t had the opportunity to work on a feature film shoot. After three or four weeks on set, they’re even better prepared to work in the industry.”

I Used to Be Darker, completed in June 2012, was named one of the most anticipated films of 2012 by Ioncinema.com. Porterfield hopes it will debut at one or more of the prestigious winter film festivals early next year.

Co-written by Amy Belk, the film follows a pregnant Irish runaway to Baltimore, where she seeks help from her aunt and uncle, who are having marital problems. The movie explores divorce and the changes that ensue when two people separate.

Although he continued to work with mostly nonprofessional actors for this film, stylistically it is something of a departure from his earlier work, says Porterfield, with much less improvisation.

“I like to think of it as a melodrama, in the traditional sense,” he says. “We’re going to deal with heightened emotion through music.” The film contains Porterfield’s characteristic wide shots, but cinematographer Jeremy Saulnier used a handheld camera to achieve a greater degree of intimacy with the characters. “The breath of the cinematographer is felt,” Porterfield says.

Porterfield’s first two films, Hamilton (2006) and Putty Hill (2011), won accolades from such prestigious critics as Roger Ebert and The New Yorker’s Richard Brody. Yet, as an independent filmmaker, whose singular vision rarely holds the kind of mass appeal sought by mainstream movie studios, he continues to rely on grants, donations, and the kindness of strangers to further his creative journey.

To obtain the last $42,000 needed to complete I Used to Be Darker, Porterfield turned to the crowd-funding website Kickstarter. He even offered to tattoo major donors’ initials on his arm as an added incentive.

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Lab Tech Witnesses More Than a Half Century of History and Change at JHU

Fall 2018

Imagine for a moment what changes you would see over the course of half a century at Johns Hopkins. Six university presidents. The arrival of the first female undergraduates. New buildings erected on a continually expanding campus. Too many experiments, discoveries, and innovations to count. Gerri Chester can tell you about it first hand, because she has spent her entire 55-year career as a lab technician in the Krieger School’s Department of Biology.

On the eve of her November retirement, Chester reflected on her time on the Homewood Campus.

In October 1957, a young Gerri Chester entered the office of the personnel department and asked for a job—what would be her first. She had a friend who worked at the Faculty Club, and she hoped they would hire her there. But the answer she received was, “No, I have something much better for you.”

Gerri Chester (left) receives a plaque from Beverly Wendland, chair of the Department of Biology, on the occasion of Chester’s retirement after 55 years of working at Johns Hopkins.

Gerri Chester (left) receives a plaque from Beverly Wendland, chair of the Department of Biology, on the occasion of Chester’s retirement after 55 years of working at Johns Hopkins.

The next day, she met with Professor Philip E. Hartman, who hired her to be a part-time lab helper, which meant washing glassware for four hours every other day. What began as a part-time job turned into a lifelong career that encompassed so much more than cleaning lab equipment.

For the next 39 years, Chester worked closely with Hartman, who taught her the ways of the department’s workspace. “He trained me for everything in the lab,” she recalls, from preparing culture plates to hunting down information in journals. “He stopped what he was doing to train me for technician work, so that whatever he assigned me to do, I was qualified to do.”

It wasn’t long before she was training everyone else who entered the lab—not only students, but also seasoned professionals. “No one did anything in the lab until they came through me,” Chester says. “Dr. Hartman had so much faith in me. He was my boss, my mentor, and my friend.”

Chester saw a lot of change over her 55 years on campus. “It was basically woods,” she says of much of the sprawling campus that is Homewood today. She recalls the opening of the Milton S. Eisenhower Library, particularly. When she started, each building had its own small library. When Hartman took her and another lab worker to the new library, where they would now go to reference journals, his whirlwind tour was so disorienting they had to go back without him and ask for a better orientation. “But we got the hang of it!” she laughs.

She also remembers excitement over inventions that made her job easier, like Xerox machines and plastic petri dishes. “When we had glass dishes, I would be trying to pour agar, and the glass dish would slide off the counter and break. When plastic came out, that was a big help. And then whoever invented the plastic that you could autoclave—amazing.”

Another noticeable change is the diversity of the student makeup. “When I came here it was all male,” she says. As an African-American woman working in a time and place dominated by white men, she says she never felt intimidated. She remembers Dr. Hartman going on recruiting trips down south to bring more African-Americans to Hopkins.

When she thinks back on what it was like when she started, and the diversity in the student population today, she marvels at how many more black people are getting a college education here now. “That is something I thought I could never live to see.”

When Chester started at Johns Hopkins, she had a 3-month-old daughter. She went on to have five more children, and with each one, she stayed home just six weeks before returning to work. She told her husband she would stop working once the last child graduated from high school, but he passed away one year before that, and she decided to just keep working.

“You know what kept me here? The support I got from each person I was surrounded by. When I lost my husband, and lost a daughter and a son, tragically, I went home and I just wanted to stay there. I felt like I just didn’t want to be around people,” she says. “Dr. Hartman and his wife came to my house and talked with me, said that I need to come back to work, that I need to be around people.”

No matter what she was going through personally, her love of her job and the people here kept her coming back, year after year.

So much so that not even retirement will keep her away. She hopes to come in a couple days a week as a volunteer. “I just want to stay here with my family,” she says.

And her Hopkins family feels the same way about her. At her retirement party, her coworkers presented her with a plaque, a duplicate of which will hang on the outside of the building. “We are already experiencing the effects of her retirement and we miss her every day,” says Beverly Wendland, chair of the Department of Biology. “It is astounding to think about how much history and knowledge she has about our department, and all of the amazing changes she has witnessed over the years. I’m so glad that she recognizes how much a part of our biology family she is, and that she has promised to come back to visit regularly.”

They are also sending her on a cruise, wherever she wants to go. “I cried so much. Tears of joy. It was just overwhelming to me,” Chester says of her send-off.