Adventures from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
This past April, you may have noticed a surplus of sparkling lights scattered throughout Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. For those who participated, Light City Baltimore provided food, music and fun. This event was so popular, it even attracted people from outside of Baltimore, including residents from Philadelphia and New York City, among other places. But for(...)
Jul 7, 2016
The atmosphere in the Albert H. Owens Jr. Auditorium in the David H. Koch Cancer Research Building was buzzing with conversation and an intellectual energy. More tha 100 people, ranging from nurses and physicians to administrators and patients who came as far as Brazil and as close as the hospital next door, were gathered for(...)
Jun 30, 2016
On May 3, I and four other Johns Hopkins students volunteered with the Personalized Genetics Education Project, or pgEd, at a congressional briefing titled “Enduring the Extremes: Space Travel, Genetics and Astronaut Health.” This briefing, co-hosted by Rep. Louise Slaughter and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, was motivated by NASA’s goal to conduct landing missions to a(...)
May 17, 2016
When you think of graduate students, they are often in a white coat, behind the lab bench, diligently punching numbers into a calculator or carefully pipetting the same colorless liquids back and forth. Of course, this is one part of the life of a student, but it’s not the whole story. Students came in droves(...)
May 4, 2016
Doctors rarely have the chance to provide a variety of free and comprehensive services to patients under one roof, but the seventh annual B’more Healthy Expo at the Baltimore Convention Center was an opportunity to do just that. In a setting where health screenings, informational sessions, exhibits and entertainment were available, members of the community(...)
Apr 11, 2016
“Nobody has to read this crap!” Ed Yong began his talk at a recent American Society of Human Genetics symposium, The Art and Science of Science Communication, with a bombshell. As scientists, we hold information in the highest regard, especially information we discovered while toiling away in the lab. But Yong insists that no one has(...)
Dec 14, 2015
Last December, a group of 15 medical students gathered in the lobby of the Sheikh Zayed Tower in The Johns Hopkins Hospital. That evening, the glass-enclosed space was filled with hospital staff members exhausted after a long day of work and worried family members of patients in the emergency room. The students formed a small semicircle and,(...)
Dec 4, 2015
Part 3 in a series of posts called “Lessons Learned in Graduate School.” Read Part 1 | Part 2. If you find yourself unenthused at the thought of topics like data management and correspondence security, you’re not alone. I usually keep these ideas filed away in the category of “probably important but too much trouble(...)
Dec 2, 2015
As the American Society of Human Genetics concluded its 65th annual meeting in Baltimore, the air around the Johns Hopkins McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine still seems to buzz with the excitement of it all. Among the plethora of innovative research and technologies presented, the society devoted some focus to those entities whose existence is(...)
Oct 23, 2015
Attending scientific conferences is one of my favorite things about being a graduate student. I get the opportunity to hear what is hot in the field, who is leading the charge and how they’re doing it. As a genetics student, I’m partial to the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) conference, an annual meeting dedicated(...)
Oct 5, 2015