Issue: Fall 2011, Volume 9 Number 1
Features
Interns Make An Impact
Last summer, 25 student interns made their mark in the city's neediest neighborhoods.
Thanks for the Memories
Mike Yassa, one of Hopkins' newest faculty members, is making great strides in memory research, and taking students along with him.
The Great Wall of Waverly
Hopkins artists, led by Tom Chalkley, have created a striking tribute to a vibrant community.
A poem lovely as … a smartphone?
Is there a place for poetry in today's high-tech world? Absolutely, says Mary Jo Salter
News
Class of 2015
This fall, Johns Hopkins University welcomed the Class of 2015 to the Homewood campus. The class comprises 1,280 students (64 percent are in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences), chosen from a record applicant pool of 19,391 high school seniors. The 2010-2011 admission season saw a 5 percent increase in the number of applications […]
Mary Ryan
“I believe in teaching-in-place, that is, exploring the actual sites where history has been made. Baltimore is a great place to do this. It was ‘erected into a city,’ as its charter phrased it, in 1796 and was built from the ground up after the American Revolution. Baltimore represents a city that was made along […]
Astrophysicist Adam Riess Wins Nobel
Nobel prize winner Adam Riess Will Kirk / homewoodphoto.jhu.edu In Baltimore, it was still dark in the early morning hours of October 4, 2011. In a modest home not far from the Homewood campus, Adam Riess, Hopkins’ Krieger‑Eisenhower Professor in Physics and Astronomy, and his wife Nancy, were being stirred from sleep by the babblings […]
Max Kade Center Launched
As America’s first research university, Johns Hopkins owes much of its legacy to the German model of higher education. So it seems particularly fitting for the Krieger School to serve as home for the new Max Kade Center for Modern German Thought, which launched late in the spring 2011 semester thanks to a generous grant […]
Think Before You, er, …Tweet?
Businessman James Andrews, arriving in Memphis on a business trip, tweeted, “True confession but I’m in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say ‘I would die if I had to live here.’” Andrews’ comments created an uproar in Memphis and jeopardized his job. “He failed to consider that once recorded and […]
Welcome New Faculty Members
The School of Arts and Sciences welcomed another bumper crop of stellar new faculty members in 2011. Each one brings accomplishments to the Johns Hopkins community. Here is a sampling: Soojin Park joins the Department of Cognitive Science as an assistant professor following her post-doctoral fellowship at MIT. Her research focuses on the constructive nature […]
The Darkroom Goes Dark
At the Homewood Art Workshops in the Mattin Center, the dismantling of the darkroom is more than symbolic. The enlargers have been moved out, and the demolition is finished. Once the conversion is complete—by late autumn— a new open space will house a digital lab, with an overhead projector, some printers, and one computer per student.
Research
Reclaiming Hart Crane's 'Splendid Failure'
Here is how John Irwin would like you to make acquaintance with the greatest poem you’ve never read: find a quiet room by yourself and have a seat in a comfortable chair. Now open a bound volume of the modernist epic The Bridge, and read aloud, starting at the first stanza. Read this: How many […]
Seeing the Eye's Not-So-Simple Subtleties
Long referred to as the window to the soul, the eye also plays an important role in regulating the body’s internal clock, impacting everything from sleep to quality of life. Now, new research from the lab of Samer Hattar, an associate professor of biology with a joint appointment in the Department of Neuroscience, gives scientists […]
Giving Voice to Those with HIV/AIDS
The most effective HIV prevention programs are tailored carefully to their intended audience, concludes Rachel Burns. Will Kirk / homewoodphoto.jhu.edu In 2008, Rachel Burns ’12, then a freshman at Hopkins, read an article in the New York Times Magazine about the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa. The article talked about how foundations were spending millions […]
Art and Amnesia: Solving Recovery’s Puzzles
Back in 2007, Lonni Sue Johnson was a successful artist and illustrator living in upstate New York. Her clever, whimsical illustrations had graced the covers of The New Yorker and had appeared on the Museum of Modern Art’s holiday cards, in children’s books, and in ads for AT&T and IBM. But by the year’s end, […]
Landlocked
Location, location, location—the popular adage implies a property’s geographical site is the most important consideration in determining its value. Generally, people want to live in neighborhoods that are first and foremost, safe and clean. In Jim Crow-era America, however, the norm was to add the word “segregated” to that list of desirables. Now Nathan Connolly, […]
Number Sense? Count On It from Birth
Illustration: Robert Neubecker When Melissa Libertus was in high school, she loved math—and was so good at it that she often tutored her classmates. When she wasn’t helping others sort out math puzzles, she puzzled on why people have such a wide range of math abilities. “I always found it fascinating that some people had […]
Can You Wrap Your Head Around M2-Branes?
Michael Beard, the aging wunderkind physicist, was worried. “He liked to think he was an old hand and knew his way around string theory and its major variants. But these days there were simply too many add-ons and modifications… Frowning for hours at a stretch, he read up on the latest, on Bagger, Lambert, and […]
Faculty
Can the Federal Reserve Save America?
At no time in recent history has the Federal Reserve garnered quite so much attention, at home and abroad. America’s central bank was thrust into the spotlight during the credit crisis of 2008 and has remained there since, employing all sorts of methods to keep the U.S. (and at times, the world) from financial collapse. […]
The Pillars of American Progress
Compared to politicians and movie stars, they’ve gone largely unknown over the decades, this cadre of professionals: teachers, scientists, doctors, administrators, lawyers, business managers—but according to Louis Galambos, professor in the Department of History, these are the very people who have shaped modern America. In his new book, The Creative Society—and the Price Americans Paid […]
Student Research
Fresh Perspectives on Autism
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 […]
The Suite Life of Ben Swartz
In Amsterdam, Ben Swartz studied with two master cellists who take very different approaches to Bach’s Cello Suites. Will Kirk / homewoodphoto.jhu.edu http://krieger2.jhu.edu/magazine/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/1-Track-01.mp3 J.S. Bach’s Cello Suites may be the most popular compositions for the instrument ever written, but their history is also the most enigmatic. “We play them at every audition,” says Ben Swartz […]
Classroom
Getting to Yes
The tension is palpable between the two disputing parties who are seated opposite each other at a long conference table. On one side are two representatives of a local teachers union, whose bitterly overworked constituents are facing yet another round of layoffs and benefits cuts. They’re fed up and thinking about going on strike. On […]
Alumni
Bringing Writing Into Baltimore Schools
“I want you to think about how to get rid of wishy-washy words,” Writing Seminars graduate Phyllis Zhu ’11 instructed asmall group of Baltimore middle school students during a summer writing workshop at Barclay Elementary/Middle School. Standing next to a white-board loaded with “wishy-washy” words and phrases, she pointed at the first example. “What’s a […]
Grappling with the Politics of Washington…State, That Is
Adam Kline (l) and Fred Finn are dedicated to Washington state residents. They were two dedicated Washington state politicians out to support a beleaguered candidate on election night at a local restaurant, when someone mentioned the city of Baltimore. “Baltimore?!” In the Pacific Northwest, it sounded almost like a foreign country. “I’ve been there,” volunteered […]
30 Years or Less
In November 2010, Variety listed Michael Diliberti ’04 as one of “Ten Screenwriters to Watch.” He was only 28 years old, but he had already worked as an assistant, executive assistant, associate producer, and executive before hanging out his own shingle as a screenwriter. In August, 30 Minutes or Less, which he co-wrote with close […]
Doing Something Disruptive
Chieh Huang ’03 (right) could have been a lawyer, and Chris Cheung ’03 could have become a financier. They could have used their degrees in economics to climb corporate ladders in what Cheung calls “shirt-and-tie jobs.” Instead, they drew on their experiences in the shirt-and-tie world to develop Office Heroes, a satirical iPhone game that […]
On Campus
Class of 2015
This fall, Johns Hopkins University welcomed the Class of 2015 to the Homewood campus. The class comprises 1,280 students (64 percent are in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences), chosen from a record applicant pool of 19,391 high school seniors. The 2010-2011 admission season saw a 5 percent increase in the number of applications […]
Preserving the Past
It takes a steady hand and lots of expertise to preserve an old and damaged but historically important print. Just ask Emily Pellichero, this year’s Kress Book and Paper Fellow at Johns Hopkins’ Sheridan Libraries. Working in the Department of Conservation and Preservation, Pellichero meticulously repaired a print of Baltimore, circa 1752, which has been […]
The Digital Media Center
Even at JHU, where innovative collaborations are the norm, the Brown Foundation Digital Media Center (DMC) stands apart. Part state‑of‑the‑art classroom and part supervised digital sandbox, the DMC gives students freedom to intertwine their primary course of study at Johns Hopkins with emerging technologies and digital art forms. Given the university’s remarkable scholars, the results […]
Insights
Preserving the Past
It takes a steady hand and lots of expertise to preserve an old and damaged but historically important print. Just ask Emily Pellichero, this year’s Kress Book and Paper Fellow at Johns Hopkins’ Sheridan Libraries. Working in the Department of Conservation and Preservation, Pellichero meticulously repaired a print of Baltimore, circa 1752, which has been […]
The Digital Media Center
Even at JHU, where innovative collaborations are the norm, the Brown Foundation Digital Media Center (DMC) stands apart. Part state‑of‑the‑art classroom and part supervised digital sandbox, the DMC gives students freedom to intertwine their primary course of study at Johns Hopkins with emerging technologies and digital art forms. Given the university’s remarkable scholars, the results […]
The Pillars of American Progress
Compared to politicians and movie stars, they’ve gone largely unknown over the decades, this cadre of professionals: teachers, scientists, doctors, administrators, lawyers, business managers—but according to Louis Galambos, professor in the Department of History, these are the very people who have shaped modern America. In his new book, The Creative Society—and the Price Americans Paid […]