Archive

Five years ago, the Whiting School of Engineering and the Bloomberg School of Public Health joined forces to create the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering, a unique academic and research effort focused on environmental issues and their impact on public health.  Since its launch, the department has been the source of major breakthroughs in…

Percy Pierre, PhD ’67, was the nation’s first African American to earn a doctorate in electrical engineering.  He became the first African American appointed as both assistant secretary of the U.S. Army for research and development and the acting secretary of the Army, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2009. He…

Awards and Honors Five members of the Whiting School’s faculty recently received National Science Foundation CAREER Awards, which recognize early-stage scholars with high levels of promise and excellence. They include:  Jeremy Brown, John C. Malone Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering, project: “Improving prosthesis usability through enhanced touch feedback and intelligent control”      Nicholas Durr, assistant…

Venturing beyond the confines of traditional engineering coursework, the Whiting School’s new bachelor of science degree program in Systems Engineering, offered through the Department of Civil and Systems Engineering, is trans-disciplinary and collaborative, connecting mathematics, engineering, social and physical sciences, and medicine. The major is designed to prepare students for a broad range of careers,…

Early-career engineers and seasoned professionals wishing to remain at the cutting edge of their professions can now enroll in executive education programs and workshops offered through Johns Hopkins Engineering’s newly launched Lifelong Learning initiative. Fourteen programs are now being offered, with additional courses in the works.  The programs, which span topics ranging from Healthcare Systems…

Recycling plastic products is a challenge. Not only are a limited number of types of plastic recyclable, but because the recycling process also breaks down polymer chains and degrades the materials’ quality, many can only be recycled a few times. As a result, recycled plastics tend to be suitable for use only in low-value products,…

A robot designed by a Johns Hopkins team has performed laparoscopic surgery on the soft tissue of a pig without the guiding hand of a human—a significant step toward fully automated surgery on humans. The researchers described the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot, or STAR, recently in Science Robotics.  “Our findings show that we can automate…

Harnessing the power of genomics to find risk factors for major diseases relies on the costly and time-consuming ability to analyze huge numbers of genomes. A team co-led by a Whiting School computer scientist has leveled the playing field by creating a cloud-based platform that grants researchers easy access to one of the world’s largest…

Office-based employees scrambled to adapt to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Anecdotally, they were successful. But just how did they do it?  Check the emails. Microsoft recently gave researchers access to more than 360 billion work-related Outlook email exchanges. These communications from 1.4 billion accounts at 4,361 companies came without content—but with useful information…

In Fairbanks, Alaska, air pollution levels are unusually high where air quality levels are driven by bitter temperatures and pollutants. A multidisciplinary team of engineers and scientists has embarked on a research mission to understand why.  The Alaskan Layered Pollution and Chemical Analysis project involves more than 40 researchers from more than 15 national and…

On the job, physicists who identify as LGBTQ+ experience—and also witness —behaviors ranging from shunning and homophobia to harassment at alarmingly high rates, according to the first-ever study of the experiences of LGBTQ+ scientists in a peer-reviewed journal. The study, which recently appeared in Physical Review Physics Education Research, also found that LGBTQ+ people from…

Johns Hopkins engineers have created a shock-absorbing material that is light and reusable—and potentially a game changer in the manufacturing of helmets, body armor, and automobile and aerospace parts.  “The new foamlike material not only offers enhanced protection from a wide range of impacts but, because it is lighter than metal, could also reduce fuel…

Don’t let the term “moon dust” fool you.Jagged and sharp as broken glass, the debris churned up when a spacecraft descends can damage vital equipment. A student team is working to characterize those “plume surface” interactions to aid NASA’s quest in pushing the boundaries of space ecploration.

When it comes to everyday objects, engineers often have an uncommon fascination with the way things are designed and the reasons behind their utility. To get a glimpse into this unique way of thinking, we polled a variety of Johns Hopkins engineers and asked them to share their insights on a favorite object of their choosing. Their answers may surprise you.

When he was 12, Apurva Varia wrote to NASA to ask if a deaf person could go to space. It had been his dream since watching a space shuttle launch on the TV in his Texas living room. The response—“No, not yet”—inspired his career as an aerospace engineer. At NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Varia…

  Joanna Clare, a fourth-year Materials Science and Engineering major from Syracuse, New York, can delineate differences in, say, polymers and composites in one breath, and in the next, spout off the nuances of jigs, slip jigs, and reels—types of Irish tunes she plays on her fiddle. Though her worlds seem opposite, Clare sees similarities…

As artificial intelligence transforms the world, Michael Chungoyn,  a PhD candidate in chemical and biomolecular engineering, doesn’t want public school students to be left behind. With Nathan Wang ’24, a biomedical engineering major, Chungyoun is developing a hands-on program to integrate AI into classrooms across the United States, beginning this year with high school students…

Structural fumigation—tenting a house and piping in chemicals to kill the bugs—is the most effective way to do it. But sulfuryl fluoride, a common chemical used for termite fumigation and the only fumigant approved by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for use in residential structures, is a potent greenhouse gas. A team led by Whiting…

When Tim Ma, MS ’05, left his job as a senior hardware engineer with Raytheon to attend culinary school, his parents, both Chinese immigrants, worried. After all, they had “come to America to work insane hours in a Chinese restaurant so their kids wouldn’t have to work in restaurants,” Ma says. But Ma didn’t let…

Ayushi Mishra, MS ’16, grew up the daughter of academics. Her father held a doctorate in physics; her mother, a doctorate in chemistry. But it is still a long way from the small town in India where she grew up to Johns Hopkins University. When it came time for Mishra to decide what to study,…

Think of baseball, and you think of numbers. The last player to bat .400 was Ted Williams in 1941. No one’s come close to repeating Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak in that same year.  Math’s importance to the sport is enduring. The statistical recap of each game (or box score) took shape in the 1860s,…

An academic year that started with an undercurrent of uncertainty and caution has drawn to a close with the campus again bustling with activity. Spring Fair, commencement ceremonies on Homewood Field, and students hanging out on the “Beach” signal a return to normalcy that I think we all craved.