This June was Baltimore Pride, a tradition dating back to 1975 that celebrates the LGBTQ+ community in Baltimore. Over 200 members of the Johns Hopkins community participated in the Pride parade on June 16, a highlight of Pride weekend that sees organizations from across Baltimore and Maryland celebrating LGBTQ+ life (see the Hub write-up). I(...)
Honoring the Past Year of Johns Hopkins Trainee Accomplishments
Posted by | Events and HappeningsBeing a Ph.D. student is like tandem skydiving for the first time: You are asked to enter the freefall into the scientific world below, with your principal investigator (PI) guiding your career path. You have no control over the journey, and you don’t even really know the endpoint because your PI is the only one(...)
Medical Education Around the World
Posted by | A Day in the LifeA few weeks ago, I completed my master’s degree in public health at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. Through the help of two projects I worked on during my master’s degree, I rediscovered a niche in the field of global health that I find particularly unique and exciting. This niche is the field of(...)
Finding the Missing Piece — the Limits of the Current Malaria Vaccine and How We Can Improve Future Vaccine Design
Posted by | Recently PublishedWith hundreds of millions of infections worldwide, malaria continues to be a global health threat and burden to vulnerable populations. For decades, researchers have dedicated work to stamping out this illness, which is caused by the parasite Plasmodium falciparum, and a vaccine was recently licensed for prevention of the disease. The vaccine, called RTS,S/AS01, has(...)
My Childhood Home: My First True Laboratory
Posted by | A Day in the LifeFor nine years, I went to summer camp in the Poconos, far away from highways and large cities in a small town near Scranton, Pennsylvania. Each summer my counselors would take our bunk on a “sneak out,” where we would go to the top of a hill, lay down in the grass and stare up(...)
Insilico Medicine: A Hopkins Startup Using AI to Enhance Biomedical Research
Posted by | Did You See This?Remember that time you Googled something and it showed up on your Facebook newsfeed the next day? These oftentimes unnerving, targeted advertising strategies are driven by gradations of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning software, which constantly improve and build in sophistication. The power in these programs lies in their ability to find patterns between(...)
On How and Why Science Is Political
Posted by | Events and HappeningsShould science be political? Trick question — science is inherently political because the vast majority of science is funded through the federal government. So, if you don’t relish the idea of competing against your peers for an increasingly shrinking pool of grant money, it’s important to care about the process by which money is federally(...)
LGBTQ+ Health Disparities: Compassionate Care Is Admitting Ignorance
Posted by | Events and HappeningsOn Tuesday, May 1, I attended the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine-hosted seminar titled The Role of Health Care Professionals in Reducing LGBTQ Health Disparities, given by Andrew Hollenbach, an alumnus of the Bloomberg School of Public Health. Hollenbach is an assistant professor in the Department of Genetics and the co-director of the basic science(...)
Three-Minute Thesis: A Case Study in the Economics of Communication
Posted by | Events and HappeningsPhoto courtesy of hub.jhu.edu Economics is defined, in practice, as the act of efficiently allocating scarce resources so as to best suit the wants and needs of humankind. In the context of a factory, this notion could refer to the efficient allocation of input commodities, such as steel and plastic, so as to maximize the production(...)
Titan Titin: When Mutations in the Largest Known Protein Affect the Heart
Posted by | Events and Happenings“We know from our clinical experience in the practice of medicine that in diagnosis, prognosis and treatment, the individual and his background of heredity are just as important, if not more so, as the disease itself.” — Paul Dudley White (1886–1973), Chief Consultant, National Heart Institute For the second installment of the Heart, Lung and(...)