“I used to worry about brainstorming sessions where all the white guys were over here, and I was over here. But guess where the solution was—somewhere in between.”
James West, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, on invention and inclusion in science.
“To say there was no impact to air quality was crazy.”
Peter DeCarlo, Department of Environmental Health and Engineering, on how U.S. air monitors routinely fail to detect pollution—even from major toxic releases, including one generated by the refinery explosion in Philadelphia in 2019.
“We were thinking, well, how does nature solve this problem? And we knew that there are worms and other organisms that colonize and live in the gastrointestinal tract for a long period.”
David Gracias, Department of Chemical and Bimolecular Engineering, on using parasitic worms as a model for tiny micogrippers that deliver drugs inside patients bodies.
“There’s a whole black market of people out there who are finding vulnerabilities and building exploits and often selling them to the highest bidder.”
Avi Rubin, technical director at the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute, on a ransomware attack that crippled the Baltimore County Public Schools system last fall.