Alumni Kudos

Geannine L. Darby ’87, director of major gifts and clinician engagement for LifeBridge Health in Baltimore, was awarded the Career Achievement Award by the Association of Fundraising Professionals Maryland Chapter for her decades-long commitment to advancing philanthropy.

Masaaki Furusawa ’91 PhD was awarded a 2022 Algebra Prize by the Mathematical Society of Japan. Furusawa is a professor of mathematics and physics at Osaka City University.

Greg Sazima ’83 received the Gold Prize in the Mind, Body and Spirit category of the 2021 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards for his book Practical Mindfulness: A Physician’s No-Nonsense Guide to Meditation for Beginners. He is a psychiatrist in northern California and senior behavioral faculty at Stanford’s family medicine residency program.

Arthur Weinman ’67 received a 2022 Merit Design Award from the Fort Worth chapter of the American Institute of Architects for his firm’s design of the Lipscomb County Courthouse restoration in December 2021.

Alumni to Watch

Janet Barnes ’14, Nursing ’20 MS, received the Diseases Attacking the Immune SYstem (DAISY) Award from Johns Hopkins Hospital, which recognizes compassionate care provided by nurses.

The co-translation of Giovanna Cristina Vivinetto’s Dolore Minimo by Gabriella Fee ’23 MFA and Writing Seminars Associate Professor Dora Malech made the longlist for the 2023 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.

Maya Foster ’20 received a Quad Fellowship, which supports interdis­ciplinary scientific and technological innovations. She is a PhD student in biomedical engineering at Yale University, where she is developing computational methods to understand severe mental illness.

Scotty’s Vag, a short film by Chaconne Martin-Berkowicz ’17, was chosen for South by Southwest 2023. Martin-Berkowicz is a writer and director in Los Angeles.

Nathan Mudrak ’22 BS/MS was awarded a Marshall Scholarship to pursue his doctoral degree in pediatrics at the University of Oxford.

In 2018, Ryan Mewett ’22 PhD sat at a wooden desk in a sea-scented room in the British city of Bristol, reading documents that looked as if they had been ignored for centuries.

As he carefully turned the brittle pages in the Bristol Archives, he came upon some that were star­tling: witness statements accusing British warships in the 1730s of participating in the African slave trade. The signed allegations were from merchants who were not concerned with the morality of capturing and enslaving people for their own profit. Rather, they were angry that the military ships were creating unfair competition.

Mewett, a U.S. Naval Commander who has served aboard nuclear submarines, knew he had found a worthy starting point for his history dissertation.

“As I worked through each new source, it gave me loose ends that would require me to go to other sources,” he says. “I kept doing that until my argument emerged, which was that, broadly, merchants had much more influence than histori­ans previously thought in the way that the Royal Navy professional­ized during the 18th century.”

Mewett, 43, defended his disser­tation in August 2022 and eight days later began a job as permanent military professor, teaching history at his alma mater, the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. “Twenty-five years ago, I was sitting where my students are now, which is a fun thing to point out to them,” he says.

Choosing to Serve

Mewett knew from a young age he wanted to serve in the U.S. mili­tary, he says.

“My dad is Welsh and my mom is Canadian,” says Mewett, who grew up in Texas. “Maybe because I was a first-generation American, I thought a fair bit about the high-minded principles of America. I thought we had a system worth preserving, and I thought people have to do that, and that I might be OK at it.”

After graduating from the Naval Academy with a history degree in 2001, he served for 17 years as a submarine officer, while earning two master’s degrees: one in international relations from Waseda University in Tokyo in 2008, and a second in naval history from the University of Portsmouth, in England, in 2017.

He notched another accomplish­ment in those years as well, winning more than $30,000 over the course of two November 2015 episodes of the Jeopardy! television show.

By then, he wanted to put his passion for history to use by becoming a professor, a job that required a doctoral degree.

Modern Naval History

Mewett chose Johns Hopkins for his PhD in part because it requires doctoral candidates to craft an article-length paper in their first year. “They want to get you right into research,” says Mewett.

His advisors were John Marshall, Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Professor of History and a special­ist in early modern Britain; and Philip D. Morgan, an expert in early modern colonial British America, who retired in 2022.

“I felt really lucky to work with both of them, because they each brought a unique perspective,” says Mewett. “The department was a great fit, and my advisors were a great fit for what I wanted to do.”

His first-year paper, “‘To the very great prejudice of the fair trader’: Merchants and Illicit Naval Trading in the 1730s,” won the Sir Julian Corbett Prize in Modern Naval History for 2019.

His 2022 dissertation, “The End of Impunity: Illicit Trade, Mercantile Power, and the Royal Navy, c.1713– 1765,” builds on his argument that the rules of the British Navy were very much formed by outside interests with their own agendas.

Mewett, who lives in Crofton, Maryland, with his wife and their two teenaged sons, plans to continue his research while find­ing his footing as a professor.

“An element of this line of work that I really like is the detective work,” he says; “running down leads and feeling like I’m looking at something that nobody has looked at before.”

Andrew Chen ’93 didn’t initially plan on becoming an orthopedic surgeon, let alone one that special­izes in treating professional skiers.

But after earning his MD from Johns Hopkins in 1997, he decided to pursue a fellowship in sports medicine with Richard Steadman, one of the world’s foremost ortho­pedic surgeons at the time, and Richard Hawkins, a giant in the field of shoulder injuries, in Vail, Colorado—the unofficial skiing capital of the United States.

Many prospective and current U.S. Olympic ski team members train and undergo medical procedures at the Steadman Clinic (formerly the Steadman-Hawkins Clinic). “That’s where I got inter­ested in working with elite skiers,” says Chen, BS ’93, MA ’94 (WSE), MD ’97 (SOM), who since 2020 has been the chief medical officer for USA Nordic Sport, an organiza­tion overseeing Nordic Combined and Ski Jumping athletes.

Olympic-level Care

Chen’s fellowship gave him significant training and experience in treating common ski-related surgeries—rotator cuff problems, shoulder instability, ACL recon­struction—and introduced him to the importance of the work.

“The Olympic movement is the purest form of sport,” he says. “Olympians do it for the glory of the sport and take it to the high­est level for the knowledge that at some point in their lives, they were the best in the entire world.” The athletes’ purposes became his. In taking care of them, he wanted to help them realize their ambitions.

Chen would go on to work with many professional and Olympic skiers, as a team physician for the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association, head team physician for the U.S. Ski Jumping Team from 2008 to 2020, and as a member of the United States Olympic Committee during the Vancouver (2010), PyeongChang (2018), and Beijing (2022) Olympics.

By protecting our young athletes, their home hills, and clubs, I know that despite the fact that the vast majority will never make it to the elite level, we are promoting their safe participation and the future of Team USA for generations to come.” 

—Andrew Chen

The stakes could often be extremely high, he says, with surgeries sometimes meaning the difference between a successful Olympic career or one cut short. For Chen, it became a calling. He would give patient athletes his email and cell number, telling them to contact him anytime— even if they were competing in a different time zone that meant he was answering calls at 3 a.m.

He says he experienced a similar sense of purpose at Johns Hopkins. He initially enrolled as a dual major in biomedical engineering at the Whiting School of Engineering, and in biology at the Krieger School. But he became interested in medicine when he collaborated with Johns Hopkins orthopedic surgeon David Hungerford on developing a laser-based, quality control system for the manufacturing process of hip replace­ments. Their project was eventually purchased by a major manufacturer.

The experience kindled Chen’s interest in orthopedic surgery and gave him a taste of something else. “It was an almost existential moment where I thought, ‘I can actually have some impact on this world,’” he says.

Helping Progress Safety Standards

Chen went on to earn a master’s degree in science and engineering, then his medical degree. “Hopkins was very comprehensive. My educa­tional experience prepared me to do essentially anything in medicine that I wanted to do,” he says. “It prepared me for the rigors of my career, especially in orthopedics.”

In recent years, especially with USA Nordic, Chen says his work has evolved. During the pandemic, for example, he turned to policymaking, contributing to what organizational measures should be put in place to keep skiers healthy and safe.

“What I am most proud of is actually in progress,” Chen says. “I am leading the charge to establish nationwide medical safety standards for our ski disciplines at the club (development) level. By protecting our young athletes, their home hills, and clubs, I know that despite the fact that the vast majority will never make it to the elite level, we are promoting their safe participation and the future of Team USA for generations to come.”