Peruse through a few articles from major journals and you’d likely come across a new buzzword: CRISPR/Cas9. Short for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats/CRISPR-associated nuclease 9, CRISPR/Cas9 is a novel way for researchers to manipulate and edit genomes. But gene editing is not a new concept. So what makes this system so powerful and transformative? […]
Postdoc Retreat Features Johns Hopkins Research, Professional Development
Posted by Paul Sirajuddin | Events and HappeningsImagine halls filled with chatter about obscure proteins that could one day be used to identify cancers, idiosyncratic assays to measure single RNA molecules in a cell and homebrew techniques to create the tastiest beer. This was the scene this past April at the second annual Johns Hopkins Postdoctoral Retreat. The event was organized by […]
May 29, 2015
What I Learned: Thoughts from a Graduating Ph.D. Student
Posted by Alisa Mo | A Day in the Life“Every blossom exhibits an exquisite disorder of ragged petals finer than lace. But one needs a lens to judge of their beauty: it lies hidden from the power of our eyes, and menyanthes must have bloomed and passed a million times before there came any to perceive and salute her loveliness. The universe is full […]
May 21, 2015
Multiple Mechanisms Underlie Human Motor Learning
Posted by Kevin Monk | Perspectives in ResearchHow do musicians know how to move their arms and fingers — and in some cases, feet — to create beautiful chords and harmonics? How are athletes able to acquire skills that make them so awe-inspiring? How do humans generally learn a motor skill and learn how to control all of our limbs in a […]
May 21, 2015
Pharmacology Student Initiative: Building a Better Graduate Community
Posted by Shannen Cravens | A Day in the LifeThe academic motto of “publish or perish” can create an isolationist graduate school environment. It can be easy to convince ourselves that our impact is tied solely to our experiments and lose sight of the fact that our time at Johns Hopkins is an opportunity to participate in an intellectual community built by both faculty […]
May 15, 2015
A Promising Therapeutic Target for Heart Failure
Posted by Soroosh Solhjoo | Perspectives in ResearchApproximately 50 percent of patients with heart failure die within five years of diagnosis due to lack of an effective cure. Scientists are working to improve this statistic. Heart failure can be caused by several of the most common medical conditions, such as coronary artery disease, high blood pressure and diabetes, which can compromise the […]
May 15, 2015
Levi Watkins Lecture Series to Feature Prominent Minorities in Science
Posted by Ryan Lang | Events and HappeningsMarc Edwards, Ph.D., has a vision for an innovative kind of lecture series at Johns Hopkins. The postdoctoral research fellow is interested in featuring prominent minority biomedical scientists and clinician-researchers from across the nation in a new program that he calls the Levi Watkins Seminar Series. “When I first came to Hopkins, I felt isolated,” […]
May 15, 2015
Advocacy Through Occupational Therapy
Posted by Benjamin Oldfield | A Day in the Life“The physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor,” said Rudolf Virchow, a German physician-anthropologist, in 1848. It was this framework for public health that motivated me in those early, molecule-based years of medical school. Ultimately, I thought my career would be more about empowerment than medications, with more attention given to social pathologies than […]
May 8, 2015
Suicide: A Disturbing but Preventable Problem
Posted by Xin Liu | Perspectives in ResearchRecently on Facebook, I saw a post from my friend about her sadness in reaction to two of her friends committing suicide. The situation was even more devastating because both of them were only in their late 20s. Suicide has become a prominent issue, especially for young adults in our society. Surprisingly, according to statistics […]
May 8, 2015
The CRISPR Craze: 3 Ways Genome Editing Is Changing Gene Therapy
Posted by Xuan Pham | Perspectives in ResearchGo to any laboratory, talk to any scientist, ask any graduate student about a technique called polymerase chain reaction (PCR), and just about everyone will have heard it and used it before. In a few years’ time — if not already — the CRISPR-Cas9 system will likely achieve the same level of pervasiveness. CRISPR-Cas9 (clustered […]
May 7, 2015