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Greg Hager, professor and past chair of the Department of Computer Science, has been named the Whiting School’s inaugural Mandell Bellmore Professor. The endowed professorship was created by John Malone, PhD ’69, and is named in honor of Malone’s thesis advisor in the Department of Operations Research. Hager is a leader in the development of…

Sharon Gerecht, associate professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, thought she was scheduled to meet an influential alumnus one afternoon last January. So when Engineering Dean Ed Schlesinger, accompanied by the university president, provost, and other division leaders, entered the nondescript classroom, she was slightly befuddled. But Gerecht’s surprise quickly turned to delight when she…

Hundreds of high school students each summer get a jump on engineering through Engineering Innovation, a monthlong program held on 11 campuses nationwide in which students do everything from measuring a campus with a ruler, masking tape, and a rope to building bridges out of spaghetti strands. What’s better, they can earn Johns Hopkins credits….

Two renowned, cross-disciplinary Whiting School scholars—Steven Salzberg and Alexander Szalay —join the ranks of Bloomberg Distinguished Professors at Johns Hopkins University. To date, Johns Hopkins has named 10 Bloomberg Distinguished Professors, a number expected to swell to 50 in four years. The endowed professorships, supported by a $350 million gift by alumnus and former New York…

When K.T. Ramesh, the Alonzo G. Decker Jr. Chair in Science and Engineering and director of the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute, talks about how materials behave under extreme impact, it’s hard not to imagine asteroids slamming into Earth. But for much of HEMI’s work—theoretical, computational, and basic—few images exist to show how materials change at…

Engineering and computer information technology graduate programs at Johns Hopkins Engineering for Professionals were highlighted in the 2015 U.S. News & World Report Best Online Programs rankings. Johns Hopkins EP, which offers part-time and online graduate courses, secured No. 12 in the Best Online Graduate Engineering Programs rankings, up two spots from last year. EP’s graduate online programs…

Five thousand years after the first metallurgists melded copper and arsenic to kick off the Bronze Age, Evan Ma, professor of materials science and engineering, is on a fascinating quest to re-engineer the internal atomic architecture that metals are made of. Ma’s specialty is the mysterious yet highly promising realm of metallic glasses: alloys that…

Children and adults hitting virtual baseballs and throwing punches at TV screens have become a common sight, thanks to video games with motion sensors. Today’s motion-sensing devices track actions using images made by cameras and infrared sensors. “But using camera images raises privacy issues,” says Andreas Andreou, PhD ’86, professor of electrical and computer engineering….

The call comes into the White House switchboard and the voice on the other end of the line hisses: “The president better not come to New York tomorrow if he knows what’s good for him.” “Wouldn’t the Secret Service like to know who is calling?” asks Sanjeev Khudanpur, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering…

Tackling Blindness A new drug-delivery strategy for vision loss, particularly effective in diabetic patients and the elderly, is closer to clinical trials in patients, says Jordan Green, co-inventor and co-founder of the startup AsclepiX Therapeutics. Green, who has joint appointments in Biomedical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering, five years ago teamed up with Aleksander…

Batteries and other energy storage could ease many of the woes currently faced by our power grid, notes Dennice Gayme, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering. Having megawatt hours of reserve electricity for on-demand delivery would make the grid more efficient and reliable, and could speed up the adoption of unpredictable wind and solar power….

Learning a neue language can be a difficult Ding, but drei Professoren in the Department of Computer Science and the School of Education’s Center for Technology Education think they may have found a novel Weg to do it. The trick, says machine translation expert Philipp Koehn—who is working with computer scientist Jason Eisner and the…

Health care workers who treat tuberculosis in developing nations diagnose the disease through an observation test. They smear a sample of sputum onto a glass slide, add a staining agent, and then count the visible bacteria under a microscope. The test is simple, cheap—and has not changed for more than 100 years. But more than…

“Conformity is ‘doubly hard’ to beat—it can obviously happen when people imitate one another, but it can also set in even when folks are trying to be distinct.” 3/4/15, DISCOVERY Joshua Epstein, a mathematical scientist and a member of the Whiting School’s Institute for Computational Medicine, who developed a new model to measure conformity that…

A Safer Suit Health care workers battling Ebola on the front lines in West Africa work in oppressive heat and face many potentially deadly hazards—all of which are exacerbated by the protective gear they wear while treating patients. Last fall, the Whiting School’s Center for Bioengineering Innovation and Design partnered with Jhpiego, a Johns Hopkins…

Glioblastoma, a rare form of brain cancer, is always fatal and kills its victims within months. Surgery, which is the standard of care, may add only a few months to a patient’s life before the cancer reappears. “Even though surgical removal is the number one choice for treatment, the surgeon knows that some of the…

In labs across Johns Hopkins, engineers and medical experts are teaming up to design innovative devices, analyze vast treasure troves of data, and optimize complex systems to revolutionize health care. A little more than a century ago, visionaries lauded the founding of a fledgling school in applied science and advanced technology at the Johns Hopkins…

Thanks to some “elegant” math, Tamás Budavári and his team have created a user-friendly catalog of images from the Hubble Space Telescope, effectively putting all the insights they hold at our fingertips. During its 25 years orbiting 350 miles above Earth, the Hubble Space Telescope has transformed the way we view the universe. The so-called…

How would Los Angeles react to the release of a toxic airborne agent? How does an epidemic spread across a town, a country, or the world? What did the ancient Anasazi civilization look like, and why did it disappear? In Systems Science for a Dynamic World, a new course taught by Joshua Epstein and Erez…

When historic Homewood Museum was considering re-wallpapering its drawing room, its conservators turned to a purchased fragment of late 18th-century French wallpaper. The paper would have been made for elegant interior decoration around the same time that Homewood—the original estate of Charles Carroll Jr., which later became the site of the Homewood campus—was constructed in…

Sandya Subramanian ’15, who developed a tool to help doctors pinpoint the region of the brain responsible for seizures in people with epilepsy, has won a scholarship from the Winston Churchill Foundation of the United States for graduate study at England’s University of Cambridge. The Churchill Scholarship is awarded annually to at least 14 students…

The time for clever Star Trek allusions was long past as a team of Johns Hopkins undergraduates, aiming to build a hand-held, lifesaving diagnostic “tricorder,” scrambled throughout the early spring to manufacture and mass-produce the real McCoy. At stake for Aezon Health, the youngest—and only undergraduate—team among the 10 global finalists for the Qualcomm Tricorder…

When she was a senior, Melanie Shimano, MS ’15, worked as a teaching assistant for an oral presentation class at the Whiting School. One of the assignments she gave students was to develop a hypothetical, two-minute “elevator pitch” that they’d give the CEO of a company where they hoped to intern. In the summer of…

Three sisters took different paths but arrived at the same place—the Whiting School of Engineering—for the 2014–15 academic year. The Lugo-Fagundo sisters—Nahyr, Carolina, and Maria—were all undergraduate students here studying engineering. Their parents, Carlos Lugo, an interventional radiologist, and Nahir Fagundo, an industrial engineer, live in the family’s native Puerto Rico with younger brother Elias,…

Seal-Bin Han ’17, a self-described “scrawny, nerdy kid,” came back from Johns Hopkins’ Ralph S. O’Connor Recreation Center one night last semester feeling down. “It’s a culture,” he says of the gym. “I didn’t know how to use the equipment, and people looked at me funny when I went to the weight room.” Stopping by…

Community Effort The Saturday after unrest erupted in Baltimore, biomedical engineering student Samy Ramadane ’17 and others from the Johns Hopkins men’s soccer team were out as a unified squad. As part of the third annual Johns Hopkins In Action, they joined roughly 400 other volunteers in activities ranging from river cleanups to packing lunches…

ELIZABETH NANCE, PHD ’12, jokes that she made Forbes magazine’s 30 under 30 list—which recognizes outstanding young professionals—by the skin of her teeth. “I just squeezed in,” laughs the North Carolina native, who turned 30 in early February. In her postdoc fellowship at the School of Medicine, Nance worked on promising new treatments for brain…

Chris White, PhD ’09, thinks that the current “one-size-fits-all” Internet is not suited for data analysis. “You use the same search engine to buy birthday presents that law enforcement uses for investigations,” says White, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s former country lead for Afghanistan. “There’s a need for technology that allows for domain-specific discovery…

As a staff research scientist with Google, Carolina Parada, PHD ’11, is changing the way people interact with their devices. Parada’s speech recognition team recently used hot word detection, also known as keyword spotting, to create an algorithm that detects sound. The result? The popular “OK Google,” a catchphrase of sorts that enables users to…

REWIND The late 1960s brought turmoil on campus and off. Soon after Charles Goldstein, MSE ’68, arrived at Johns Hopkins in the mid-1960s to pursue his graduate degree, he went apartment hunting. He remembers being surprised to find that housing in Maryland was still segregated. “In the row houses near Hopkins, the landlord could choose…

Aaron Baughman, MS ’07, was planning a trip to Disney World with his daughters when an idea seized him: What if there was a device that would lead them to the rides they’d love best? “The idea is to have people [wearing] devices like heart-rate monitors that get signals from the body, or from cameras…

The recent civil unrest in Baltimore has reminded us all of the deep and long-standing social and economic issues that are yet to be addressed here, and in the country as a whole. Though the unrest was triggered by the death of Freddie Gray, it is clear that its roots exist in a history of…