Features

Big Data

Science is drowning in bits and bytes of information; Krieger School researchers are casting a lifeline.

Around the World in 16 Days

The weeks between fall and spring semesters provide an ideal time to study abroad.

Hopkins Symphony Orchestra Turns 30

Composed of Hopkins undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, staff, alumni, and community members, the HSO is celebrating its 30th year.

News

New Academy Brings Research to Retirement

A rendering of the renovated Greenhouse, which will house the Academy. When esteemed university professors retire, they generally take their expertise and rich knowledge base with them. How can retired profs continue to be fundamental participants in a university’s intellectual community? Enter The Academy at Johns Hopkins, an institute for advanced study, where retired professors […]

Homewood Arts Programs

When in search of a creative outlet, Johns Hopkins undergraduates need look no further than the Homewood Arts Programs. Whether they have a passion for dance, music, art, or theater, students can pursue their muse in myriad ways. The Homewood Arts Programs offer co-curricular groups where students can train, perform, gain valuable experience, meet new […]

Richard Conn Henry & Steve Hanke

“One time throughout the world, one date throughout the world.” —Richard Conn Henry, professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and Steve Hanke, professor in the Whiting School of Engineering with a joint appointment in the Department of Economics, writing about a new calendar they’ve devised, where each year remains the same as the […]

Rebuilding the Foundation of Science Education

A new university-wide initiative aims to change the way science is introduced to undergraduates. With the launch of the Gateway Sciences Initiative (GSI), the Provost’s Office and educators from around Johns Hopkins are hard at work improving introductory science courses. By encouraging the use of new teaching technologies and techniques, the GSI ultimately strives to […]

Hopkins Economist Appointed to the Federal Reserve

In January, the Federal Reserve Board appointed Professor Jon Faust as special adviser in the Office of Board Members. Faust is the Louis J. Maccini Professor of Economics in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and the director of the Center for Financial Economics at Johns Hopkins. His appointment is a homecoming of sorts: […]

From Graffiti to Hospital Waste

Growing up in Houston, William McCance ’12 never saw much graffiti. Then he came to Baltimore, where its sweeping strokes are everywhere, from abandoned buildings to community centers. Local graffiti culture encompasses decades of history, he learned, but some of it is also fleeting. “You find [a piece] you like, and you go back a […]

Learning Chinese Opens Doors to Collaboration

As China’s economy continues to grow, so does the country’s scientific and technological prowess. Decades ago, the West viewed China largely as a beneficiary of its science, technology, engineering, and medical (STEM) advances. Yet over time, the East has become a hotbed of research and innovation of its own. “Many of the great STEM breakthroughs […]

Research

Progress Versus Tradition in China

Christopher Mirasola ’12 spent the summer after his sophomore year studying Chinese in Beijing. There, his roommate told him about his father’s struggles with the family’s river rafting business in a remote part of the country. New cement factories were polluting the waterway, and tourists didn’t want to paddle on a dirty river. The roommate’s […]

Gauging Gatsby’s Universality

Chris Benner ’12, like countless other American students, has declared F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby his favorite novel. But this steadfast literature student has stretched his fascination with the Great American Novel, as it is often referred to, beyond its American rags-to-riches theme. Eager to know if the novel—with its beautiful prose, complex character portrayals, […]

A Breakthrough Ruling Rocks Not-so-Mundane Iowa

Andrew Rosenberg ’12 recognizes that his native Iowa—known for corn, soybeans, and the state fair—might seem mundane to his East Coast classmates. But he’s quick to point out that, compared to its neighboring states, Iowa is considered cutting edge. And for the past year and a half, Rosenberg has delved into a political firestorm in […]

Unearthing the Rise of Ethics in Medical Education

As a regular reader of medical journals, pre-med student Lindsey Hutzler ’12 thought nothing between their pages could shock her. Then, perusing the medical archives at Hopkins, she came across an article revealing that Johns Hopkins, in academic year 1977–78, was the first medical school nationwide to implement a course on medical ethics in its […]

Solving the Mysteries of Vision

In the retina, the thin tissue carpeting the back of the eye, an intriguing type of cell functions as the biological equivalent of an alarm clock. Melanopsin cells are critical for setting the body’s circadian rhythm. “They detect environmental light levels and signal this information to brain regions involved in controlling the sleep/wake cycle,” says […]

Hopkins Astrophysicists Detect One of the Farthest Supernovae

A team of Johns Hopkins astrophysicists using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has detected a distant Type Ia supernova, the farthest stellar explosion that can be used to measure the expansion rate of the universe. The supernova is the remnant of a star that exploded 9 billion years ago. The sighting is the first finding of […]

Reach Out and Touch Something

Pick up a pen, a cup, a book—no big deal; we don’t give it a second thought, right? But if we close our eyes and pick up the same object, how would we still know what it was? What kind of neurons are firing in the brain that help us recognize objects we hold in […]

Professor Discovers Remains of Ancient Human Ancestor

It seems that “Lucy” was not the only hominin on the block in northern Africa about 3 million years ago. Early this spring, a team of researchers that included Krieger School geologist Naomi Levin announced the discovery of a partial foot skeleton with characteristics (such as an opposable big toe bone) that don’t match those […]

Faculty

A Day Late and a Euro Short

A faculty roundtable discussion on the economic crisis in Europe…why it started, who it might harm, and how to fix it.

The Plastic Beauty

In 2004 and 2005, women who didn’t like their looks could win makeovers on the FOX television show The Swan. For three months, 16 women per season lived in a mirror-free home, while teams of plastic surgeons, dentists, stylists, and therapists worked to change them. In the season finale, the woman who had changed the […]

Student Research

Conspiracy Theories Deconstructed

In March 2011, Nolan DiFrancesco, a Hopkins junior who was studying at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon, received a text from a fellow student that classes were going to be cancelled due to rain. But this wasn’t just ordinary rain. It was radioactive. Ten thousand miles away, several Japanese reactors were leaking radioactive […]

Classroom

Space is Her Passion

Like most people her age, Jessica Noviello uses Facebook to announce exciting developments in her life. So when the 19-year-old sophomore from Smithtown, N.Y., learned she had become the first student approved for a new minor course of study at Johns Hopkins, she proclaimed it via social media. “I’m now a space minor!” read her […]

Film & Media Studies

Worth a Surf: krieger.jhu.edu/film-media Film and Media Studies is an undergraduate program incorporating courses in film history, aesthetics, and theory; theory and practice in television, popular culture, and new media; and all aspects of 16mm film and digital video production, including narrative, documentary, animation, and experimental film. Students in the program begin making films almost immediately, and they […]

Wretched Subjects

For most of us, the name Galileo Galilei evokes a vision of a nearly infallible “father of modern science”—a man of learned truths, a visionary undeterred by the ritualistic and religious trappings of his time. Most of us do not picture a prolific astrologer who not only made a pretty penny by teaching this now […]

Community

Where are they now?

For some students at Johns Hopkins, the arts are pretty serious business, and they’re determined to turn their passions into careers. It’s no surprise that many of them are accepted to graduate schools to study film, museum studies, digital media, or visual arts. Others use the expertise they gained at Johns Hopkins to land jobs […]

Alumni

“I Sit with Shakespeare and He Winces Not”

“When I was a freshman, sitting in my room in Griffin House,” John Guess, Jr. ’71 remembers, “I read that line, and it stuck with me. It’s with me to this day.” From the classic 1902 W.B. Dubois essay “Of the Training of Black Men,” the passage was somewhat of a starting point for Guess’ […]

Fueled by Curiosity, Fulfilled by Storytelling

Frank Bond ’77 inside the Newseums’s News History Gallery. Will Kirk / Homewoodphoto.jhu.edu Standing beneath 12-foot-tall slabs of graffiti-covered concrete, Frank Bond ’77 explains journalism’s role in bringing down the Berlin Wall. Whereas people could not travel across the barrier, information could. “As technology advanced,” he says, “it got to a point where the Iron […]

Rwanda's Long Walk from Genocide to Well-Being

When Donald Koran ’80, MA ’82, PhD, worked in Rwanda from 1999 to 2001, as deputy chief of mission, the second-highest diplomatic post in a U.S. embassy, the country’s 1994 genocide was still a fresh wound. Parts of Rwanda were still dangerous, and at times, U.S. officials had to travel with armed guards. When Koran […]

Hopkins Globetrotter Still on the Fast Track

After a childhood that took her from Vienna to Belgrade to Washington, D.C., and Jakarta, it’s only fitting that Marian Smith ’05 would make her career covering the globe. Only now she’s doing it from her desk at msnbc.com in London. As an editor-producer for the online news organization, Smith has a high-pressure job producing […]

Traveling the World in the Name of Health

“Throughout my career, I’ve been a voice for putting patients first.” —Freda C. Lewis-Hall ’76 photo: John Halpern As chief medical officer for Pfizer, the world’s largest research-based biopharmaceutical company, Freda C. Lewis-Hall ’76 spends plenty of time in board rooms and high-level meetings, deliberating on the safe, effective, and appropriate use of Pfizer medicines […]

On Campus

Model United Nations Conference Celebrates 15th Anniversary

Clad in business suits and high heels, flocks of young men and women hurry down Baltimore’s Pratt Street toward the Renaissance Hotel on a breezy February evening. Soon, all 1,650 or so individuals gather in the hotel’s ballroom for opening ceremonies of the much-anticipated four-day event for which they’ve traversed 14 states and two countries […]

Insights