Adventures from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
The food industry is a fast-paced, constantly evolving market, wrought with disruptive ideas and technologies, ever-changing trends and new health crazes. However, today’s latest food fads aren’t as simple as the switch from regular to Greek yogurt, or the ushering in of free-range chicken products. Recent years have seen a boom in a burgeoning field(...)
You’ve probably heard of dopamine before. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter—a chemical in the brain responsible for conveying information from one cell to another. It has made quite a name for itself because all of our favorite things—eating delicious food, seeing the person you love, hearing a good song come on, getting a gift, winning a(...)
Imagine you are an incredibly busy and stressed out graduate student (this shouldn’t be hard to do) and you have started to experience increased fatigue over the last three months. In addition, you sometimes feel odd heart palpitations and even shortness of breath when you are simply walking across campus to give your samples to(...)
The weekend of November 4 was bustling in Boston. As the nippy winds of early winter settled into the northeastern city, energetic physicians and medical trainees hustled back and forth down Newbury Street for the annual conference of the Association of American Medical Colleges. This year, over 4,500 people attended the annual Learn, Serve, Lead(...)
Medical research is not only conducted by professors in the hallowed halls of educational institutions. Other notable research bodies include privately funded research institutions, pharmaceutical companies, government, and nonprofit organizations. Industry labs have a targeted approach, often searching for a drug to treat a specific disease or to address a particularly lucrative problem in medical(...)
“You’ve heard about some of these pet projects, they really don’t make a whole lot of sense, and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.” -Sarah Palin As a graduate student in a lab(...)
Each year, the Johns Hopkins graduate programs organize a white coat ceremony for graduate students to recognize the completion of their graduate board oral examinations (GBOs). For graduate students this test is the gatekeeper to our training; it transitions us from students to Ph.D. candidates and marks the commencement of our thesis work. The students(...)
What is artificial intelligence today? While innovators and philosophers debate the consequences and likelihood of C-3PO or HAL appearing on Earth, we have already accepted a variety of forms of artificial intelligence in our daily lives. Self-driving cars are proving to be successful on our streets, and over 90 percent of flight time on airplanes(...)
“If getting drunk was how people forgot they were mortal, then hangovers were how they remembered.” ― Matt Haig, The Humans Matt Haig’s quote exemplifies the dreaded and inevitable consequence of a night of heavy drinking: hangovers. While the scientific community condemns drunkenness as a threat to individual health and public safety, drinking and hangovers are tales(...)
Aloha! Being a medical student has its perks. Over the past semester, my medical school experiences have taken me across the country. I’ve traveled to various conferences in Chicago, Washington, D.C., Boston, and this month, Hawaii, where I attended the American Medical Association (AMA) Interim Meeting in Honolulu. The AMA is the largest coalition of(...)