Fresh Perspectives on Autism

Fall 2018

The social met the spatial in Alex Murray’s recent study, which could hold out promise for children with autism.

Will Kirk / homewoodphoto.jhu.edu

Could children with autism improve their social skills by also improving their ability to discern spatial relationships? That’s what Alex Murray ’12, working with Amy Shelton, associate professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, hopes to find out.

In fact, Murray’s initial research using Hopkins student volunteers did show a “significant” correlation between the two apparently unrelated skill sets.

“It was surprising and definitely not what we were expecting,” says Murray, who says she has been reading books about neuroscience disorders since the fifth grade. “But it was exciting because we know that [how people discern a point of view] is something you can train and get better at, so it could possibly have a reciprocal effect—a person could improve their social skills by improving their ability to perceive spatial relationships.”

Murray first tested her subjects to determine their level of social development through an autism quotient test, approximately 50 questions that help scientists measure the extent of autistic traits in adults by the range of their responses to various scenarios (i.e. “I find myself drawn more strongly to people than things.”) Then she constructed buildings out of plastic Lego blocks, stood them on a table, and placed either an artist’s modeling doll or a simple wooden block to mark different viewpoints of the buildings.

When she asked her subjects to identity photographs taken from the different viewpoints of the Lego buildings—either from the perspective of the doll or from the block—she found that those who scored better on the social skills test had an easier time identifying the perspective from the doll’s point of view than those who didn’t score as well on the test. Murray believes that’s because the doll, in its role as a “social agent,” made the less socially well-adjusted participants feel uncomfortable. Both groups scored similarly when trying to identify points of view from the block.

Murray, whose findings with principal investigator Shelton were published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, hopes to start testing children next and then engage kids with autistic spectrum disorders to see if the correlation holds up. If it does, Murray says she’d like to set up a training study to see how teaching spatial relationships could improve social skills. “Since we found a correlation between the two, we think there could be some residual effects—if you train a person to improve on one [perspective taking], they could improve on the other [social skills].”

For now, the neuroscience major hopes to pursue a dual MD-PhD degree and continue the work she’s started as a Wilson Fellow. “The fact that I found a correlation in my preliminary data that had never been found before was an amazing thing,” she says. “We’ll see what happens from here.”

Professors and Students Pursue Paths to Accomplishment

Fall 2018

As the end of my own “freshman year” as dean approaches, it seems an appropriate moment to reflect on what I have learned about the unique qualities of the Krieger School’s students and faculty since my arrival last September. Two vantage points have given me an intense exposure to my new academic life. I have had the great pleasure of hosting nearly 800 undergraduates as weekly dinner guests in my home over the course of the year and have taken the opportunity to talk with them about their classes, campus life, and what they hope to pursue when they leave us. The second perspective comes from an invigorating series of “Futures Seminars,” mounted by each of the Krieger School’s departments and programs as part of a long-range planning process that will guide our growth over the next five to 10 years.

Thanks to the generosity of the Zellicof family, whose gift supported our Monday night dinners, I have spoken informally and at length with undergraduates from every nook and cranny of the Krieger School. They have come together with faculty members from whom they are taking courses; hence, each group of dinner guests is a community of students with common interests who have taken the evening off to share a meal with faculty they usually see only in the classroom or the lab. Their teachers have a chance to talk informally about their own research, throwing their slides up on my living room wall.

Adam Riess shared the mysteries of dark matter, with commentary from Chuck Bennett and David Kaplan, with several dozen physics majors who wanted to know how these remarkable scientists went about deciding what bold problems to tackle in measuring the expansion of the universe. Michela Gallagher explored new horizons in the study of brain functioning that may unlock the key to Alzheimer’s disease before a crowd of 40 majors in neuroscience and psychology. Jacques Neff was accompanied by students in German, French, and Italian literature who had the opportunity to see the “rough drafts” of texts from some of the greatest writers of the 17th and 18th centuries, their scribbled margin notes and line edits reminding us that even the great masters have their moments of doubt. A group of students in the Writing Seminars had the pleasure of hearing Mary Jo Salter read a new and chilling poem, a meditation on an airline disaster in the making through the voice of a passenger who comes to realize his number is up.

In the dinner line, I heard from students who are pre-meds, with minors in art history, and math majors who are minoring in French literature. Students tell me about the elementary school children they are tutoring in East Baltimore, the modern dance ensembles that are their pride and joy, and the pressures they feel to be the best of the best. In these uncertain times, they worry out loud about what the job market will hold for them. What I have learned about our students as they crowd my living room floor is that they are very serious and extraordinarily hardworking, perhaps more than they should be. They feel responsible to their families to get the most out of their Hopkins experience, to prepare themselves for the competitive tournament of graduate school admission. As much stress as this has created, our students have built a robust culture that is one part friendship, two parts high achievement, and another part the ethic of service. Fulfilled, ambitious for a future of accomplishment, ready to take what the world throws at them: That is how I see our students.

Our Krieger School Futures Seminars have given me a chance to hear faculty in 20 of our 34 departments and interdisciplinary programs (so far) think out loud about what the most pressing intellectual puzzles of the next decade are likely to be. The auditorium of Mason Hall has been packed to the gills. Experts in Islamic art or the great painters of early modern Northern Europe have discussed how these fields enlarge art history as it moves steadily beyond its epicenter in Renaissance Italy. Biologists from the Scripps Institute, Harvard University, and the University of Colorado converged in Mudd Hall to discuss, among other things, the new science of obtaining genomic sequences. Political scientists from Yale, Northwestern, and the University of Chicago argued the relative weight the field should give to the politics of policy versus the philosophical questions that lie behind questions of power.

Krieger School faculty seem excited about the new ideas that are emerging from these encounters; and they take a notable degree of pride as their colleagues in adjacent fields turn out for four-hour marathon sessions.

The Futures Seminars are a vehicle for rethinking where we are going, for planning in a thoughtful and deliberate way how we should invest our intellectual capital, and for discovering ideas that a more conventional approach might overlook. For a new dean, the seminars are also a vehicle for observing what animates my colleagues, discovering what grabs their attention—and for surfacing new ways faculty might combine forces to make even more out of the talent we have assembled in the Krieger School.

Above all, the seminars make it clear that the faculty is a perfect match for the students they teach. On both sides of the experience spectrum, we have an intellectually serious, dedicated community, looking for ways to maximize their impact, ready to think in innovative terms without being faddish, determined to develop a distinctive approach to their calling. It has been a remarkable privilege to join them all.

Katherine S. Newman
James B. Knapp Dean

Suited to a "T"

Fall 2018

When Emily Li Mandri ’09 found herself contemplating life after Hopkins during January of her senior year, she considered going to graduate school for art history or possibly getting an entry-level job in the arts. Neither option seemed right at the time. Then the idea struck her: “Maybe I can make something.”

So the art history major who had long hand painted T-shirts for friends as gifts, rented a booth at Hopkins’ Spring Fair for $100, taught herself how to silk screen, and spent about a month working in her off-campus apartment screening colorful images and geometric patterns onto 30 shirts.

Li Mandri showed up at Spring Fair on a Friday thinking she had enough stock for three days. She was wrong. The $30 shirts sold out within hours and she found herself silk-screening around the clock to keep up. By the time the fair ended on Sunday, the exhausted undergraduate knew that she hadn’t just made a bunch of shirts, she had made a business—and her company, Natty Paint, was born.

Today the company is booming. Li Mandri expanded to three fashion lines, including one featuring vintage clothing that she tailors and silk-screens, and a line of contemporary original designs. Her label, named as a nod to the nickname for Baltimore’s National Bohemian beer and the 18th-century term for “fashionable,” is available at a number of small boutiques across the country and worn by performers including Rye Rye, MIA, and Animal Collective.

The self-taught seamstress and fashion designer relocated from Baltimore to Brooklyn, N.Y., last year and spent this winter working on an original 36-piece clothing line that includes such items as a wool bomber jacket embellished with a gold foil design that she hopes will be available in stores like Nordstrom, Bloomingdale’s, and Urban Outfitters come fall.

“Silk screening has definitely been associated with crafty clothing, but that’s not what I’m going for,” says Li Mandri, 23, who just started an MBA program at NYU’s Stern School of Business. “I’m looking to be high fashion, to make things that will be taken more seriously than just a whimsical T-shirt. I want people to see my clothing and think it’s unique.”

Li Mandri, who minored in entrepreneurship and management, Italian, and psychology, gives a nod to Baltimore’s vibrant arts scene for helping to foster her creativity and credits Hopkins for teaching her how to channel and develop her interests.

However, she admits her non-traditional fashion background comes as a surprise to some. “People see what I’m doing and think I’ve been to school for fashion and I’ve been trained to do this,” she says. “Then when I explain that I taught myself, and I went to an amazing school where my education helped me be driven and keep myself busy and manage my time. [Then] they see how my ambition translates really well into what I’m doing now.”

Hard Work in the Big Easy

Fall 2018

Phil Bildner ’90 quit his New York City teaching job five years ago—but now more than ever, he’s involved in the work of educating students. Co-founder of The NOLA Tree, a nonprofit organization that brings volunteer high school students to New Orleans for service projects, he revels in guiding students in what he calls “real world learning.” By immersing themselves in post-Katrina communities, the students learn critical life lessons.

“The learning taking place is wonderful–it’s so exciting as an educator to see it,” says Bildner. “These are 15-, 16-, 17-year-olds recognizing that they can be successful community organizers.”

Before leaving the public school system to write children’s books full time, Bildner taught middle school language arts and history in the South Bronx and Upper Manhattan for 11 years. His current oeuvre ranges from picture books to chapter books to teen novels, and he is especially well known for Sluggers, a six-book baseball adventure series (www.philbildner.com). Ever the educator, he’s kept in touch with many of his former students, and it was one of these friendships that gave birth to The NOLA Tree.

In 2007, he heard from a former student who asked if he would chaperone him and 10 other students to New Orleans to help with post-Katrina recovery. (Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in August 2005, but rebuilding efforts continue still.) The students had signed on for the service project through their school, but the school would no longer sanction it. So, with dear friend Ana Galan, who would become his NOLA Tree co-founder, Bildner flew down with the group as well as two of Galan’s teenage sons, headed for the Big Easy.

“It was really hard,” says Bildner. The group slept in an abandoned warehouse with intermittent electricity and no water. They used an outdoor shower across the street, with a FEMA tarp for a curtain. That one shower, and two porta-potties, were shared by 87 volunteers.

“We all knew there would be no creature comforts,” he says. “Some kids did the job and said, ‘I did that, that’s just not for me,’ and some kids came back, three or four times, and that’s phenomenal.”

Bildner, Galan, and the students worked with local groups to do the work that the city didn’t or couldn’t do. They cleaned empty lots, gutted homes, hauled garbage. But they’ve also restored homes, gardens, and public spaces. Some of the students have returned to the project several times, getting to know the families and communities that they’ve helped, and even sharing home-cooked meals with occupants of homes they’ve restored.

In 2009, Bildner and Galan formalized the organization, securing 501c3 status for it. In 2010, they made four trips to New Orleans, coordinating efforts with local groups to do cleanup, gutting, roofing, siding, and drywall. The volunteers come from high schools across the U.S., and each trip takes 15 kids and three adult chaperones for one week.

“We get up at 5:30, eat, make lunch, show up at the job site by 7:30, work until 5,” says Bildner. “After dinner, we’re doing something in the evening, not going to sleep until 11, 12, 1 o’clock. Some of the kids rise to the challenge, pace themselves. And some kids are like, ‘Wow, this is what it means to work.'”

The experience tends to be so powerful, in fact, that Bildner advises parents about what to expect when their teenagers return to their own comfortable lives. At first, the teenagers don’t want to talk about it. “It’s visceral and intense for them, seeing the devastation and the human spirit like that,” he says. “It can be a difficult adjustment when they go home.” Months later, though, when the students open up, the thank-you letters from parents arrive, he says.

The NOLA Tree’s board of directors is composed of students and adults, including one of Galan’s teenage sons. “We don’t just want adults calling the shots,” he says. “This is youth-driven.” Currently all the coordination falls on the shoulders of Bildner and Galan–legal documents, flights, housing, van rental, insurance information, emergency numbers, permission slips for minors, notarization of emergency care. Bildner would like some help with that work, either from parents or volunteers. “We’re looking for guerilla philanthropists,” he says.

Future plans for The NOLA Tree include an emphasis on going local. “My own backyard–that’s one of the directions we’re heading in.” Ideally, the founders would see their volunteers apply what they’ve learned toward initiatives in their own communities.

And will NOLA Tree experiences show up in any of Bildner’s forthcoming books? Says Bildner, “The kids say I should write about it, and I say, ‘No, I’m waiting for you to write about it.'”

The Writing Nut

Fall 2018

Much of Marshall Honorof‘s novel, Space and Sensibility, came to light during his commute into Manhattan. “Most people have more time in their day than they realize,” says Honorof ’09. The Long Island Rail Road provided many of the hours needed to churn out 1,700 words per day; Professor Jean McGarry, in the Writing Seminars, provided the inspiration.

While reading Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility in Narrative Design with McGarry, Honorof asked if anyone had written a sci-fi version. McGarry told him he should write it. First, he had to graduate. But after that came National Novel Writing Month, a worldwide movement to spend the month of November blitz writing a potentially bad, but complete, manuscript—what NaNoWriMo refers to as the Great Frantic Novel. (“It’s all about quantity, not quality,” note the project’s rules.) At the same time, Honorof’s employer, Barnes and Noble, issued a call-to-arms: The company was launching a self-publishing platform and needed employees to participate in the program.

At 186 pages and set partly on a space station across the solar system, Space and Sensibility exists in e-book format and can be purchased online. “I’m not making a ton of money off of this,” says Honorof. “But you buy yourself a few lunches. It was a great experience.” Next November, he’ll write another novel.

When not writing novels, Honorof plugs away as an e-book editor, embedding metadata into the texts, and writing his blog, The Chronology Nut (chronologynut.tumblr.com). A self-proclaimed “avid reader, gamer, and pop culture fan,” he blogs about long-running pop culture series—books, television shows, video games—in chronological order, instead of the order in which they were released. (Think Star Wars, which released Episodes 4, 5, and 6 before circling back to 1, 2, and 3.)

The blog seems to be gaining ground: For a long time, a Google search of “chronology nut” would display results related to a peanut products recall, but now Honorof’s blog pops up first.

Explore Further:

A Champion for Young Americans

Fall 2018

“Why should I care?”

That’s the question that Paula Boggs ’81 wants to answer, right after delivering the message that young Americans ages 16 to 24 are the most unemployed group in the United States.

A member of the newly established White House Council for Community Solutions, Boggs is one of 26 leaders from business, academic, and philanthropic sectors who have been tapped by the Obama administration to find solutions for what some are calling a “burning platform” problem. The official U.S. unemployment rate is 9.4 percent, but young people are harder hit, with a rate closer to 10.7 percent. “Beyond that, there’s another set of young Americans who are underemployed,” says Boggs, who is executive vice president and general counsel of Starbucks Coffee Company.

The council focuses primarily on the plight of young Americans, too many of whom are undereducated, underprepared, underemployed, or out of work. “Even for our young people who receive their high school diploma, there’s too often a gap between skill sets and jobs available,” says Boggs. “As a council, our twin goals are to move the needle for them in education and employment.” The biggest areas of opportunity: technology, health services, and financial services, says Boggs, a member of the council’s communications group.

Using town halls and various media, she and her colleagues intend to help America care about its young people who are out of work. “Our job is to come up with creative messaging around the idea of, ‘What’s in it for me?'” she says. “What’s in it for all of us includes a drop in crime, a reduction of welfare rolls, and so much more. We can make that business case and support it with data.”

As an executive within Starbucks, she makes another case for why business and industry should care: “We have an ongoing need for talent within this age group, in a significant way…. We have a mandate for growth. A company like Starbucks very much cares about youth leadership and supports me in my work with this council.” In some ways, she says, this kind of community involvement is “unabashedly self-serving.”

But Starbucks is not the only heavy-hitter represented on the council. Serving with Boggs are the president and chief executive officer of eBay, as well as the president of the Gap Foundation. “Corporate America is showing up in a big way,” says Boggs. Other members include leaders such as the president of Tulane University, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, and singer Jon Bon Jovi. (“He came to the first meeting fully prepared and equipped with a three-piece suit,” Boggs reports.)

The council was established by executive order, and it has a two-year period of duration. Already, the members have begun to identify programs that offer lessons. One such program in Nashville focuses on helping young mothers who have child care issues that interfere with their ability to work. A disproportionate number of unemployed young Americans are women who were working at age 18 but out of work by age 25: “One of the most significant reasons for that is motherhood,” says Boggs. “We want to figure out creative ways to honor that choice while also giving young mothers the tools to continue to grow in their careers, stay in the workforce, and acquire new skills.”

Other programs, like one in Baltimore, help teach young people life skills, such as what to wear and how to interact in job interviews. “We see this at Starbucks all the time,” she says. “Too many young people do not have the role model that enables them to put their best foot forward in a job interview.”

The bottom line for Boggs is getting out the council’s message. A long-serving member of the Johns Hopkins University Board of Trustees, as well as the American Red Cross Board of Governors, and the Advisory Council for KEXP FM (an NPR affiliate), her reach is wide. In Washington, D.C., she’s known on both sides of the aisle as someone who started her career in public service first as a military officer in the Pentagon and then as a federal prosecutor in Seattle.

“It doesn’t really matter that much whether it’s Democrats or Republicans in the White House; the Hopkins connection in D.C. endures,” she says. With her working group colleagues, she’ll develop communication programs and campaigns, reaching out to Fortune 500 companies and individual citizens. “There are as many ways to express support as there are Fortune 500 companies,” she says. “We worry about falling behind other nations’ economies. … Our nation can do better in cracking the code on these problems.””

Hathi Trust

Fall 2018

hathitrust.org

Hathi is the Hindi word for elephant—a creature known for its incredible power and remarkable memory. Such is the inspiration for hathitrust.org, a massive undertaking of more than 50 universities around the country, now including Johns Hopkins.

HathiTrust is a partnership of elite research institutions with a shared goal: digitally archiving the volumes of university libraries across the United States. The trust not only preserves the massive holdings but also serves as a single point of access to millions upon millions of university books, volumes, and other research materials.

At press time, the trust had accumulated nearly 8 million volumes of information, roughly 25 percent of which is fully accessible to the public through the website. The remaining materials have at least some cataloged information on where and how they might be accessed.

The Johns Hopkins University Libraries began contributing Hopkins’ extensive collections to the trust in late 2010. Aside from sharing information, Hopkins’ libraries will partner with HathiTrust to develop the infrastructure and storage systems required for an ever-increasing cache of research material.

Putting the Focus on Quantum Matter

Fall 2018

Scientists in a new institute in the Department of Physics and Astronomy are working to unlock the mysteries of quantum matter and reveal secrets that may eventually have practical applications in energy and information technology and superconductors.

The Institute for Quantum Matter (IQM) is a partnership among physicists at the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and Princeton University, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Basic Energy Sciences. The institute’s aim is to create a “tight interaction” among theory, materials synthesis, and advanced spectroscopic tools to probe materials that are necessary to discover new phases of matter, according to director Collin Broholm, a professor of physics at Hopkins.

“What we have basically done is to create a new institute by bringing together participants with different expertise, allowing us to work in a very focused way,” explains Broholm. “Our goal is the discovery, application, and understanding of materials with novel quantum mechanical properties.”

IQM researchers from Johns Hopkins include Broholm, N. Peter Armitage, Oleg Tchernyshyov, and Zlatko Tesanovic, all of whom are professors in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Robert Cava, a Princeton University materials scientist who previously worked with Broholm at Bell Labs, is also involved.

IQM’s sparkling new lab is located in the Bloomberg Center for Physics and Astronomy and is stocked with state-of-the-art equipment, including a crystal growth laboratory and a range of “furnaces” used for preparing ceramic starter materials.

“Although quantum mechanics is typically thought of as a physical theory for understanding atomic particles such as electrons and nuclei, it also governs the interactions between the particles that make up everyday matter, and IQM’s mission is to investigate these kinds of matter,” explains Armitage.

Those materials include superconductors, which are materials that can carry electrical current without friction and, as a result, don’t waste energy generating heat. Familiar superconductors include those in high-speed magnetic levitating trains and hospital MRI machines. However, most superconducting materials in use today work only at very low temperatures, which means that they must be coupled with pricey super-cooling equipment.

At IQM, researchers are exploring the close connection between superconductivity and magnetism in metals, which may eventually make superconductivity “viable for room-temperature applications,” according to Broholm.

Such practical ramifications, however exciting, are not the raison d’etre of the new institute, according to Armitage.

“Although there may be applications for the materials we investigate, applications are not the primary interest, at least not at this time,” he explains. “We regard the study of these materials and the search for new states of matter as basic science, as fundamental as anything done in cosmology or astrophysics.

“What could be more fundamental than figuring out how simple particles that are governed by simple physical laws can conspire to give complex quantum mechanical effects?”

At the Frontier of the “Terahertz Gap”

Fall 2018

Physics and Astronomy Professor N. Peter Armitage is quick to point out that many basic investigations aimed at understanding the fundamental nature of materials—such as the one he is conducting—have resulted in practical applications that have improved life in some way. Two good examples are the transistor radio and magnetic resonance imaging.

“These discoveries enabled technologies that transformed our world,” says Armitage, a researcher in the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy as well as the new Institute for Quantum Matter in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. “Even if those practical applications were not the original purpose of those studies, they are often the result.”

It’s too early to say what practical applications might come of Armitage’s recent research project, a three-year study funded through a $2.2 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Armitage’s work involves the invention and development of new optical techniques and instruments to explore the characteristics of complex condensed matter such as superconductors, electronic gases, and quantum magnets.

“Specifically, we are developing low-energy optical spectroscopies in the so-called ‘terahertz gap,’ which is the experimentally difficult frequency region above that attainable with electronics but below that accessible with photonics,” Armitage says, referring to the use of light to examine materials and their characteristics.

The terahertz frequency range is considered a frontier in optical and condensed matter research.

“It is hardly an exaggeration that most of what we know about physical systems, from the acoustics of a violin to the energy levels of atoms, comes from oscillating them at their natural frequencies,” Armitage says, “and it’s staggering how many materials show natural frequency scales in the THz range. The community hasn’t been able to perform reliable measurements in this range until recently.”

According to Armitage, these materials are tremendously important for both potential applications and fundamental science. “In the long run, the techniques we develop will be used as a basis for the development of even newer technologies, such as near-field THz microscopy and THz polarization sensors for nanoscale and biological systems,” he says.

Making Spare Minutes Matter

Fall 2018

A graduate student in the Communications in Contemporary Society program in the Krieger School’s Advanced Academic Programs, Colker is changing the way people get involved in community service as co-founder of the Extraordinaries, an Internet-based program allowing “microvolunteers” to use their skills and expertise online.

Colker’s project (www.sparked.com) combines volunteering, the Internet, and mobile phones to pioneer a new form of activism in which almost anyone with a smart phone or Web access can devote spare time to a useful charitable or scientific task. More than 40,000 micro-volunteers have already signed up to carry out a wide range of tasks, from helping the SETI Institute develop social media outreach materials, to aiding village leaders in Kenya research grant opportunities for new hospitals.

Through the www.sparked.com website, nonprofit groups can easily post questions, problems, or tasks, and thousands of micro-volunteers can read the posts to offer assistance. Volunteers may select from 12 areas of interest, including poverty, youth, injustice, food, politics, and animals, and then decide which personal skills they will use in their spare time to help solve problems posted there.

“For the most part, traditional volunteer opportunities require a certain level of commitment. They require a commitment of time,” Colker says. “Our approach is to help make it so easy that in the same amount of time it takes you to check Facebook or watch a YouTube video, you could actually do something worthwhile.”

Colker’s work has caught the attention of the Rolex Awards for Enterprise: Young Laureates Programme. He is among the first group of young social entrepreneurs to be honored by the program.

Last November, Colker and four other winners were feted for their dedication to overcoming challenges in the fields of public health, applied technology, the environment and cultural preservation at an award ceremony at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland. Colker was the only laureate from the United States; the others are from the Philippines, Nigeria, India, and Ethiopia.

The Young Laureates Programme seeks to foster a spirit of enterprise in the next generation by giving young people the financial support and recognition they need to innovatively tackle the challenges facing humanity. The laureates, all between 18 and 30 years of age, will each receive $50,000 over two years, giving them time to focus on their pioneering projects and move forward in implementing them.

Colker says he will use his Rolex Award to expand microvolunteering to more Internet users and gain publicity to “encourage millions of people to volunteer.”

A notable success for the project came in January 2010, in the aftermath of the massive earthquake in Haiti. From its headquarters in San Francisco, the Extraordinaries team engineered a website within 72 hours, enabling its volunteers to compare photos of missing people to photos taken by news agencies. The volunteers identified 24 of the missing people.

“It was just an incredible moment, realizing, Wow, we actually found missing persons using this technology that didn’t exist before,” he says. “My hope is that…we will have millions of people sharing their skills and expertise and helping to move humankind forward. That’s a big goal, but that’s what we wake up every single day and try to do.”

Hard-Won Food is Tastier

Fall 2018

It’s commonly accepted that we appreciate something more if we have to work hard to get it, and a Johns Hopkins study bears that out—at least when it comes to food.

The study seems to suggest that hard work can even enhance our appreciation for fare we might not favor, such as the low-fat, low-calorie variety. At least in theory, this means that if we had to navigate an obstacle course to get to a plate of baby carrots, we might come to prefer those crunchy crudites over the sweet, gooey Snickers bars or Peanut M&Ms more easily accessible via the office vending machine.

"Basically, what we have shown is that if you have to expend more effort to get a certain food, not only will you value that food more, but it might even taste better to you," explains Alexander Johnson, an associate research scientist in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the School of Arts and Sciences. "At present, we don’t know why effort seems to boost the taste of food, but we know that it does, and this effect lasts for at least 24 hours after the act of working hard to get the food."

The results of the study, which appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, are significant not only because they hold out hope that people who struggle to maintain a healthy weight could be conditioned to consume lower-calorie foods, but because they also might provide insight into methods of altering other less-than-optimal behavior, according to Johnson, study leader.

He teamed up on the project with Michela Gallagher, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences and Neuroscience and vice provost for academic affairs at Johns Hopkins. Using ordinary laboratory mice, the team conducted two experiments.

In the first, mice were trained to respond to two levers. If the mice pressed one lever once, they were rewarded with a sugary treat. Another lever had to be pressed 15 times to deliver a similar snack. Later, when given free access to both tidbits, the rodents clearly preferred "the food that they worked harder for," Johnson says.

In the second experiment, the team wanted to ascertain whether the animals’ preference for the harder-to-obtain food would hold if those morsels were low-calorie. So half the mice received lower calorie goodies from a high-effort lever, and half got them from a low-effort lever. When both groups of mice were given free access to the low-calorie food later, those that had used the high-effort lever ate more of it and even seemed to enjoy it more than did the other group.

"We then analyzed the way in which the mice consumed the food," Johnson explains. "Why did we do this? Because food intake can be driven by a variety of factors, including how it tastes, how hungry the mice were beforehand, and how ‘sated’ or full the food made them feel."

Johnson and Gallagher used licking behavior as a measure of the rodents’ enjoyment of their treats, and found that the mice that had to work harder for their low-cal rewards did, in fact, savor them more.

"Our basic conclusion is that under these conditions, having to work harder to get a certain food changes how much that food is valued, and it does that by changing how good that food tastes," Johnson said. "This suggests that, down the road, obese individuals might be able to alter their eating habits so as to prefer healthier, low-calorie food by manipulating the amount of work required to obtain the food. Of course, our study didn’t delve into that aspect. But the implications certainly are there."

Data-Scope: The Best, Bar None

Fall 2018

Imagine a tool that is a cross between a powerful electron microscope and the Hubble Space Telescope, allowing scientists from disciplines ranging from medicine and genetics to astrophysics, environmental science, oceanography, and bioinformatics to examine and analyze enormous amounts of data from both “little picture” and “big picture” perspectives.

Using a $2.1 million grant from the National Science Foundation, a group led by computer scientist and astrophysicist Alexander Szalay of Hopkins’ Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science, is designing and developing such a tool, dubbed the Data-Scope.

Once built, the Data-Scope, which is actually a cluster of sophisticated computers capable of handling colossal sets of information, will enable the kind of data analysis tasks that simply are not otherwise possible today, according to Szalay, the Alumni Centennial Professor in the Krieger School’s Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy.

“Computer science has drastically changed the way we do science and the science that we do, and the Data-Scope is a crucial step in this process,” Szalay says. “At this moment, the huge data sets are here, but we lack an integrated software and hardware infrastructure to analyze them. Data-Scope will bridge that gap.”

Co-investigators on the Data-Scope project, all from Johns Hopkins, are Kenneth Church, chief scientist for the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence, a Department of Defense-funded center dedicated to advancing technology for the analysis of speech, text and document data; Andreas Terzis, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Whiting School of Engineering; Sarah Wheelan, assistant professor of oncology bioinformatics in the School of Medicine; and Scott Zeger, professor of biostatistics in the Bloomberg School of Public Health and the university’s vice provost for research.

Data-Scope will be able to handle five petabytes of data. That’s the equivalent of 100 million four-drawer file cabinets filled with text. (Fifty petabytes would equal the entire written work of humankind, from the beginning of history until now, in all languages.)

The new apparatus will allow Szalay and a host of other Johns Hopkins researchers (not to mention those at other institutions, including universities and national laboratories such as Los Alamos in New Mexico and Oak Ridge in Tennessee) to conduct research directly in the database, which is where Szalay contends that more and more science is being done.

“The Data-Scope will allow us to mine out relationships among data that already exist but that we can’t yet handle and to sift discoveries from what seems like an overwhelming flow of information,” he says. “New discoveries will definitely emerge this way. There are relationships and patterns that we just cannot fathom buried in that onslaught of data. Data-Scope will tease these out.”

Szalay notes that there are at least 20 research groups within Johns Hopkins that are grappling with data problems totaling three petabytes. (Three petabytes is equal to about 20 billion photos on Facebook.) Without Data-Scope, “they would have to wait years in order to analyze that amount of data,” Szalay says.

The two-year NSF grant, to be supplemented with almost $1 million from Johns Hopkins, will underwrite the design and building of the new instrument and its first year of operation, expected to begin in May. Szalay said that the range of material that the Data-Scope will handle will be “breathtakingly large, from genomics to ocean circulation, turbulence, astrophysics, environmental science, public health, and beyond.”

“There really is nothing like this at any university right now,” Szalay says. “Such systems usually take many years to build up, but we are doing it much more quickly. This instrument will be the best in the academic world, bar none.”

Jonathan Bagger, vice provost for graduate and postdoctoral programs and special projects at the Krieger School, believes that the Data-Scope positions Johns Hopkins to play a crucial role in the next revolution in science: data analysis.

“The Data-Scope is specially designed to bring large amounts of data literally under the microscope,” he says. “By manipulating data in new ways, Johns Hopkins researchers will be able to advance their science in ways never before possible. I am excited that Johns Hopkins is in the forefront of this new field of inquiry: developing the calculus of the 21st century.”

The instrument will be part of a new energy-efficient computing center that is being constructed in the basement of the Bloomberg Center for Physics and Astronomy on the Homewood campus. The house-size room once served as a mission control center for the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer, a NASA satellite. This computing center is being built using a $1.3 million federal stimulus grant from the National Science Foundation.